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J & J's Travels
James again. Jen has volunteered to do the thankless task of uploading 2 weeks worth of photographs onto the computer, after I moaned persistently about it for 30 minutes. (I am a moan)
Anyway, from Hanoi we both booked ourselves on a train "the Reunification Express" too the old capital the royal city of Hue. The train journey was an experience. Let me tell you about it.
The train journey was to take 12 hours and as such was an overnight sleeper train. I personally was quite looking forward to the experience, as I am particularly fond of sleeping horizontally.
We boarded the train full of expectation and were shown to our "cell" it was a tiny room 5 foot wide by six foot long with 2 rows of 3 bunkbeds. Ours was to be the top bunk(remember my backpack was bigger than Jen and Jens makes her look like a backpack that has grown legs and learnt to walk).
We had to sleep with our backpacks. Jen was upset as her backpack does not snore, talk in its sleep, steal the bed sheets, kick her or grope her. I was upset because my backpack is rubbish in bed.
Anyway, to make matters worse we were to share our cabin that night with a group of australian women on a shopping tour. Instead of carrying grandmas ashes with them it looked like they had brought her coffin. It took 3 Vietnamese men to carry it onto the train (turned out to be the worlds biggest suitcase witches!!)
Meant that Jen and I had to climb down by standing on their beds.
Suprisingly, though I had a pretty good sleep and Jen for a change didn't snore.
We arrived in Hue early the next morning after being bundled from a moving train on its way further south to ho chi minh city.
The old royal city of Hue was Vietnams capital when ruled by the Nguyen dynasty from 1802 to 1945 and was a pretty impressive place. The old city and the royal palace is sorrounded by an impossing wall and moat and is a copy of the forbidden city in China. With Hue as our base for a couple of days we managed to befriend a couple of local motorbike taxi riders who looked after us like family and introduced us to local cuisine and drinks, such as snake wine, sugar cane juice, noodle soup and sugar street cafes, while taking us on various tours of the local royal tombs, pagodas and American military bunkers (see photos).
These guys were poor and struggled to make a living but did so with dignity and pride (we were begining to realise that the further south we went the nicer the people became). Our parting gift to them, at their request, was 2 tins of condensed milk for their children, which was unaffordable to them.
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