Are we about to be be Hanoi-ed? No Hue!

A good few people we have met on our travels have warned us that when you travel up Vietnam, things go downhill. The people get ruder and more deceitful the further north you get. After the tailors fiasco in Hoi An we wondered what we were getting into, heading north to Hue.

The 4 hour bus was inevitably padded out with trips to franchised shops and restaurants under the guise of being visits to tourist attractions. The 1st stop at the marble mountains was amusing. They wanted to make us pay to go into a cave??!! Then we were verbally assaulted by people selling all kinds of tack in....wait for it...marble. Or so it turned out, mostly cheap marble powder.

The strange naked ladies and the statue of a little boy holding his winky and a football next to the porky chuckling Buddhas were particularly funny.

The 2nd stop at Lang Co after the beautiful Hai Van Pass was rather less amusing. This rather authentic looking photo of a local fishing was far from it, although at the time I genuinely thought it was. Unfortunately he was posing; asking people to take his photo while he pretended to fish and then asking for payment. Fair enough if someone takes a sneaky pic of you, go ahead ask for payment (yes, I have started doing that too!) but don't court it! I am sure that man could make a living actually fishing or in some other way than posing as a cliche for package tourists and hoodwinking them into paying you money. It seems so sad, in fact it really upsets me that they do it. I don't get why you would want to hang up your self respect at the door when you leave the house for your days 'work'

Anyway, back on the bus for a couple of hours and we arrived in Hue feeling hopeful. We seemed to be able to see normal Vietnamese life around us. That and a whole lot of rain, see video below.

The weather wasn't great, but somehow it didn't dampen our mood. Hue has the highest annual rainfall in Vietnam and given the scenes of flooding that we witnessed and the locals indifference to it, they must be used to having a lot of rain.

Hue was a world away from the Hoi An, a place that can be described as some kind of Disneyland Vietnam but with crap staff. Once again we felt we were in a place not ruined by tourism. The people were nice, the scenes we saw were real and (thank Buddha) the food was good. There's no denying that the rain was a bit of a nightmare, because we couldn't get out as much as we could and we couldn't visit the DMZ and tunnel complex at Vinh Moc, but when we did get out it was all good. Hiring bikes to explore cities seems to be our favourite activity in SE Asia

This is Hue's crazy, Chinese Pagoda/cubist style Cathedral (that was really a Catholic church) along with the remnants of the flood. At least I got to wear that 150 quid rain jacket again! Hearing mass in Latin was peculiar too

The Citadel impressed even jaded backpackers like us. Exploring the winding back streets and lanes unearthed all kinds interesting scenes, and the lakes with their Chinese fishing nets and fields of water spinach had us reaching for our troublesome camera.

Chinese fishing nets

Bizarre public art

A lot of joss sticks, drying in the sun or getting ready for the mother of all ceremonial offerings

The fortified main entrance to the Citadel is called, you guessed it, The Flag Gate.

Inside the Imperial City contained within the walled and moated Citadel was a huge complex of Palaces, Temples and Parks that were built by the Nguyen Emperors in the 1800's.

We stumbled across the worlds biggest grasshopper

If only this really was a no lying zone, it'd be a nice change for SE Asia

PS - The Editor says sorry about the pun-riden post title