Hue, Vietnam

Since my last update we’ve done a few cities, Hue (pronounced whey like curds and whey) and Hoi An (the Taylor Town) and just arrived in Nha Trang (Beach Side High rise Resorts) this morning.

Hue, it’s fairly small has a very cool old town surrounded by a moat and some big walls, cool bridges over the moat and a big lit up bridge over the river. Roy did a DMZ tour, I still remember doing it from when I was here with the oldies and can’t remember it being that exciting, Roy came back saying it wasn’t at all exciting. I did have quite a funny day though, I got a push bike and went exploring looking for some breaky. I cam round a corner on the far edge of town and some young guys were training their Roosters for some cock fighting. I stopped to take a few photos. They trying the “one photo, one dollar” I laughed “no way”, they seemed happy enough just to look at photos of them selves. ( not quite the spastic fits of laugher that over took they kids in ThaTek, Laos ) I got a few photos (New camera is a bit nicer than the old) as started to sprinkle some rain, and an older guy came round the corner who could speak a bit of English.  He invited us all into some ones house to get out of the rain. We had a few cups of tea, a fair few of us crammed into the front room of some guy’s house. Once the tea was gone they pulled out the Rice Whiskey, a fairly strong tasting Metho concoction brewed in large earthenware pots. We finished off one bottle, and I paid the 80 cents for another bottle, and we got stuck into that. About halfway through that, my stomach lining started to remind me it was only 9am and I hadn’t eaten yet. I managed to get away a few shots later, promising to return that afternoon with some of the photos printed out.  I got some omelette and bread into my now Metho filled stomach, wandered back to the guest house to select the photos to print, then to a local photo lab. After dropping off the memory card I walked out into a “hello, where you from?” “Melbourne, Australia” “oooh, uhhh, Springvale, I have family in Springvale” “yeah, cool” “ooh today is a happy day my Australian friend, we should go drink, and eat together” I’m a little hesitant, but with a bit of a buzz from the mornings whiskey I agree. He jumps on his motorbike, I’m on my pushy behind and we head over to the other side of town for lunch. It’s a fairly large undercover collection of plastic chairs and trestle tables, we order some food. A small esky filled with beer, water and a bit of ice is plonked at the end of our table. His English is really really good so we chatted a fair bit about Vietnam, Australia, our families and my previous visit to Vietnam. We put a reasonable dent in a massive bowl of some of the nicest fried rice I’d had in Vietnam, and some yummy prawn and veggie stir fry, and empty to beers from the esky.  The bill arrives, and he pays ( against my protests ) and then he starts reminding how good it has been to talk and drink together, and how it would be great to tell his wife about me, over a bottle of wine or whiskey that I buy for them. I feel the little “click” of things falling into place, unluckily for him I haven’t been to the atm in a few days and only had about 100,000 dong on me (about $8.50).  we head to a local shop to buy a bottle, and he leads me towards the expensive shelf of imports, I remind him of my previously stated cash situation and he begrudgingly accepts some weird looking Chinese whiskey in a funny shaped bottle. By my calculations he was still about $1 up on the deal, but I don’t think he would have been quite so generous at lunch if he had known he wasn’t gonna score bottle of import.

I’ll update on Hoi An, and put some photos of what I got made tomorrow.

Cheers
Will Cowan