Day 125 -

Our stupid bus journey which would last for an eternity was today and we left the hotel in the afternoon for the night bus to Hue.

I made sure that I had my sleeping pills and then settled in on my bunker. WELL the sleeping pills DID NOT work and I had the worse journey of my life, even worse than the last one, I swear the pills were making me trip out which wasn't good either!

Why can't any of the buses at least not have screechy brakes?! AND that bloody horn they repetitively honk, if you didn't keep overtaking on corners and near missing all oncoming traffic you wouldn't have to beep all the time!!!

One of the worse feelings; absolutely dying for a wee and the bus on the toilet didn't work and we weren't stopping for at least 3 hours, O-U-C-H.....

Please just get me to my destination....

Day 126 -

After another horrible journey we eventually arrived in Hue and booked into our new guesthouse. This time we weren't staying in the 'backpacker' area but will amongst the chaos that is Vietnam and if we really wanted to get amongst our fellow travellers, the area was only a 10 minute walk away.

As a consequence of the bad weather that we had experienced in the last few days, we realised that we had passed through a lot of Vietnam rather quickly, too quickly in truth, and now had over two weeks left in the country with only two more places to visit. We prayed for sunshine just so we could at least stretch out a few of the days left in Hue before moving to Hanoi.

Nevertheless, we booked a tour for tomorrow called the DMZ Tour and spent the rest of the day walking around the city; the rain by the way was not coming down, instead it was saving itself for our trip tomorrow. We ventured over to the so called backpacker hotspot and realised that it wasn't anything to shout about anyway. We did stop for some food at one of the many restaurants and characteristically picked the worse one as the food turned out to be rank.

Night time bought bedtime for us, the previous death, I mean bus journey had really taken it out of us.

Oh and I must add how superb our room was. We've reached the conclusion that when it comes to hotel rooms, the Vietnamese are extremely generous. The size and comfortableness of the rooms that we've stayed in have been first class which is odd really because everything else, vehicles for example have been cramped, sweaty and unpleasant. Maybe they really appreciate the prospect of a good night's sleep...

Day 127 -

You know those days that turn out to be 'one of those days'? Well today was undeniably one of them. Not for good reason either.

Admittedly, it started well. We got up when the alarm went off at stupid o'clock which, for us, meant that this was a good start whatever the day. Although the skies were murky and grey, it wasn't raining and we woke with a positive and optimistic attitude.

The tour was obviously a popular one as there were at least 20 or 30 other tourists waiting for the bus at the front of the hotel with our English-speaking tour guide rounding everybody up.

Once on the bus, the tour guide took out her little microphone and introduced herself as ... yeah can't remember her name unfortunately, she had one of those voices that drones on and on and on and by the end of the first sentence all I was hearing was blah, blah, blah.

The tour was 9 hours long and we found out once on the bus that 6 hours of this would be driving. After the 3 hour journey of getting to where we were going, we stopped for breakfast which was inclusive in the tour price. One word, revolting. I didn't touch mine, couldn't even look at it without feeling sick, who knows what it was meant to be. The clouds had just opened too and down came the rain.

After breakfast, and I use this term lightly, we drove over a bridge with some historical significance but droney-whiney-tour-guide woman's voice was too hard to comprehend so I had a guess that it must have something to do with the war as on either side of the bridge there were two large cannons.

Next stop a monument of a group of soldiers conspicuously placed on a hill. Again something to do with the war.

On we went to the next stop which was the main part of the tour; the Ho Chi Minh Trail tunnels. I'd like to emphasize at this point at how badly it was raining and how eccentric our bus driver was driving. The two don't really mix well and certainly don't soothe an already hammering heartbeat.

Anyhow we got to the tunnels and found out that they were used in the Vietnam war to transport food and water, etc. They were very similar to the tunnels used in the South but were a little bigger. We were allowed to go into one and went down a fair few metres. We were in the tunnel for about 20 minutes and when we came out of the other end we were on a beach!

I got Anth to take a picture of me at this point, you know a nice one with the beach in the background, when he'd taken it we had a look at the picture and Anth's comment on it was "God you look like s***e!" Ha thanks, summed up my day really!

On the bus we went again and travelled through some mountains. This was really interesting actually as although it was raining you could see for miles and the view was incredible. Anth told me that the guide had just said that this is where a load of the napalm bombs were dropped and you could still see the damage that they caused.

The final stop of the day was a War Museum which was appropriately placed in the absolute middle of nowhere. It took a whole 5 minutes to walk around and have a look at everything inside it and then we got some pictures of us standing in front of a army tank outside.

The after all of the mind blowing events of today it was time to make the 3 hour journey back home.

The 'one of those days' part really starts here. We were driving at lightning speed down a long straight road which of course was sodden with rain therefore causing it to be a long, straight, slippery road. As you've probably gathered by now, nobody gives a monkey's arse about fellow road users and if something or somebody is in the way drivers will just beeeeeeeeeep until the thing/body has moved and there is NO WAY that they are going to slow down to prevent a collision.

Now this road was so straight that you could probably see for at least a mile in front and far away in the distance, a little dot seemed to be moving across the road. As we came closer we realised that the dot was actually a man pushing a bike. Our driver didn't slow down though, oh no, he probably speeded up the lunatic. Next thing we hear is the dreaded beeeeeeep, then everybody was shunted forward as the brakes (yeah found them have you?) were applied then an almighty thud echoed through the bus and the sound of something being dragged underneath us lasted for about 30 seconds. We then skidded all over the show until finally we came to an abrupt halt as we hit a bollard on the side of the road.

Well, there was about a 3 second silence and then the whole bus went into full scale panic mode. A few girls were crying, somebody screamed, Anth (who had somehow been stood up through all of this) was now trying to look out of the back window to see what the hell had come out of the other side and I was quivering like a vibrating power plate.

The force of the collision with the bollard had made the bus door cave in and the bus driver with all of his might couldn't get it open which caused more panic as everybody just wanted to GET OFF THE BUS! Next thing this mucho Superman 'have no fear I'll save the day' kinda guy gets up and starts kicking the door through with such determination on his face I thought he was going to do himself a mischief.

So, Superman busts the door open (luckily for him, how embarrassed would he have been if he hadn't of managed to 'er sorry folks it's not gonna budge and I've broken me left toe') and everybody gets out thinking that we're going to find a bloody trail of brains and flesh when actually we find the remains of a used-to-be bicycle!

Phew! The little dot-man is ok! He'd managed to dive out of the way just in the nickey but his poor bike (which he had probably been saving up for his entire life) had got the brunt of it. He hadn't got away completed unscathed though, one of his ears looked completely mangled and one side of his body had been scraped and bruised and boy did we know about it! Well not really because he was talking in Vietnamese but if it was in English it probably would have sounded like 'you f***ing t***, didn't you f***ing see me f***ing there in the middle of the f***ing road you f***ing d***head!!'

Yet again that feeling came over me and everyone else by the looks on their faces that nobody wanted to get back on the bus. That is everyone but the bus driver by the way. He looked so chilled out and relaxed that anyone would have thought he'd just squatted a fly rather than knock an innocent man off his bike with a ten tonne bus.

Apparently in Vietnam if there is a crash like this one today then it's just tough luck. There is no insurance payout or compensation to neither the driver's bus nor the poor victim. Only if there is a death then the person at fault has to pay the deceases family a certain amount of money over a period of time (could be a life time depending how much they earn). No prison sentence or driving ban though and if the person shows a lot of remorse (this usually means they have personally apologised to the deceases mother) then their fine gets reduced. In this case the dot-man won't get anything, no medical care, nothing. I don't actually know what would happen if say he hadn't died but was seriously injured because they have to pay for medical treatment and there is no way they could afford it.

Before begrudgingly getting back onto the bus, or else be left in the middle of nowhere, I asked the tour guide with the droney voice if she could TELL the bus driver that he better slow down and it's DISGUSTING that he was driving like a complete LOON in the first place. She did do and he did slow down well until the tour guide got dropped off then it was full steam ahead again. This man, well he's probably dead now if he kept driving like that, he seriously needs to learn about patience!

Anth and I kept ourselves occupied and our eyes off the road anyway by talking to a lovely Brummy couple on the way back. We still clocked some very near misses with oncoming trucks and our hearts skipped a fair few beats but nevertheless we made it back in one piece.

That night we had a few well deserved double vodkas and vowed that we were not getting on a bus again in Vietnam. We had bought a bus ticket already for our next journey from Hue to Hanoi but decided to scrap it and get the train instead, a much wiser decision and thank god for the invention of the railway.

Day 128 -

Today we left Hue on our train to Hanoi. During the day we didn't do anything except try to sell our coach tickets, no such luck.

With nothing else to do we headed to the train station and got there pretty early, waited around then finally boarded.

Anth and I were in the end compartment with two boring people who had remembered to bring a packed lunch with them and a game of cards for the long journey - doh!

Well we didn't fancy sleeping just yet nor sit in silence in our room so we found two spare chairs, parked them up in the corridor and had a right giggle about God knows what for about 4hours. Anthony cracks me up hehe....

We eventually got our heads down at about 1am not realising that the train gets in at 2am...

So here we are, nowhere booked to stay, don't know where to go and it's 2 o'clock in the morning. Planning? Blah blah blah.....

As soon as we vacate the train we get mauled by about 3 trillion 'taxi' men who will take us anywhere (in the world by the sound of things) we want to go for practically nothing, they happen to know of numerous hotels as well that have a spare magnificently luxurious double bedroom awaiting our presence. Yeah thanks but no thanks.

We instead we got a metered taxi to drive us around the city centre until we found somewhere to stay. All the hostels seem to be closed down for the night; in fact the whole city seems to be dead. Pitch black, not a light on in sight, very energy efficient. Anyway the only places available for us to sleep in are the more expensive hotels and we end up taking the cheapest one of those which still set us back a whole GBP50.00 for one night, pah!

The hotel was nice anyway and breakfast was included which we had at about 3am then went to get our heads down for the remainder of the night.