Hue, Ha Noi and another change of plans!

This is a bumper post today because we didn't spend much time in either place!

Hue - 3rd April 2014

Another 4 hour coach trip from Hoi An and we arrived. We nearly got ripped off by a taxi trying to get to our hotel only a couple of minutes away but after settling in and taking a 25 minute walk, we were soon there and in the imperial city that Hue is famous for.

It dates back to the Chinese rule and took massive damage during the war with America but is slowly being restored. There is a main gate with 3 entrances, the middle only for the emperor, the others for his servants.

Once through there (about 220,000 dong for the both of us) we were in front of the 'forbidden purple city' which is basically only for the emperor. The inside of his palace had little decoration thanks to the French getting their mitts on everything when they took over, but the architecture was still impressive enough, especially with the red painted columns and gold Chinese writing on them.

The tourism boats in Hue

The Emperor's palace within the Imperial citadel

Within the Imperial city

Cool gazebo in the Imperial city

We explored the rest of the imperial city, of which there isn't tonnes of due to this being an epicentre of conflict, but the restoration projects taking place since have given an insight as to how it looked before. Which as you can imagine is very grand indeed.

Getting close with the locals

After looking round all there was to see we set off home and ate in the backpacker district - having a cheap and cheerful pizza near our hotel.

This is a great place to visit, don't get me wrong, but coming from Hoi An it didn't quite compare. Perhaps going from north to south gives you a better mind set for this place!

The next day was spent waiting for our 9pm train to Ha Noi and we spent the time booking other travel and accommodation arrangements ahead of us (see update below).

We then shared a cab with a Brazilian and a Lithuanian who both live in Germany and talked about all sorts, whilst our train was delayed we also got talking to some dutch travellers and one crazy German - we really felt part of the crowd at last!

Ha Noi - 5th March 2014

We chose the soft seat carriage for the overnight 13hr trip to Ha Noi, whilst our friends all had beds. I wondered if we'd made a bad choice and I was proven right. Unlike our soft seat trip from Nha Trang to Da Nang this was more crowded and full of weirder people, including a lady opposite who kept eating corn then throwing it up half an hour later.

We both got some very intermittent sleep and arrived in Ha Noi - as I'd heard it was just like Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), but slightly nicer. There is a lake in the main part of town that's the main attraction and it was a tiny bit calmer there than the rest of the bustling, noisy capital.

We were here for 2 days with a break inbetween to stay in Ha Long bay on a pre-booked tour (more on that in another post).

The hotel was nice enough but was in a really busy part of the 'old quarter' - a place I found fascinating because each street had shops that seemed to specialise in selling just one thing: there was clothes street, metal street, food street, baby supplies street, sweets street and our street: stationary street. At least here if you need anything you know what street to go to!

We didn't explore too much of Ha Noi, mainly due to a bit of exhaustion from constant travelling over the last few weeks coupled with a sense that this place, like HCMC wouldn't have loads to offer compared to other places we had visited and will visit.

We left Ha Noi and Vietnam on the 8th of April and were very ready for a change of scenery at this point, on the way we got chatting to an American girl who'd had some near misses with muggings so we felt that as we hadn't been ill (not badly anyway) or mugged etc, we kinda got off lightly here! Still, you never know how It's going to go I guess!

In all, Ha Noi was ok, but I personally don't like the big cities here in Vietnam (I say Vietnam, but I doubt the cities throughout the rest of Asia are any better personally). Which is why we didn't really explore more, but it certainly wasn't the worst place we stayed in.

Another change of plans!

So as you can guess, we've now left Vietnam, we didn't fancy living there in the end so our job search went further afield to Thailand and Bali etc.... And whilst we had a few job offers to work there we both did a fair amount of soul searching and came to an ultimate decision: whilst we love travelling through Asia, we just don't think we would settle anywhere to live, no matter what the job or location.

As we as this, this is the first time we've ever had the freedom in our lives to choose not to work and we've really enjoyed that, so we both decided that rather than take a job to "see us through", we'd rather just travel while we can.

So we turned down all of our job offers in favour of simply travelling! The plan is now this: we travel from Vietnam to Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia before boarding a flight in mid May to Rome via a day in China. Once there we are touring Italy for a month (It's our favourite country in the world) before spending the majority of the summer living there with a family near Turin, who we've agreed to become au pair's for their children during the summer holidays Italy.

So it's another big change of plans but one we are really excited about and probably sees us back in the UK around august time. The teaching career isn't put to bed completely, but we've just decided not to do it in Asia for now, and having our meals and accommodation paid for in Italy for the summer was too good an offer to turn down. It's always been about Italy in our minds and knowing we are going to stay there the longest gives us so much excitement.

I'll fill you all in on more details as we go along, but that's the gist for now, in the meantime it's off to Cambodia to see the legendary temples of Angkor Wat!