We arrive in hue and swiftly depart to see the local sites on a motorbike tour, Hue is thankfully a small town and traffic is not bad as we exit the town we are soon in the country watching paddy fields of rice whiz by and spotting the odd water buffalo being used to harvest the fields. Our excellent tour guide takes us to a local village where we go to a rice museum, here a little 80 year old lady demonstrates old equipment used to grow and harvest the rice, as she demonstrates how wicker baskets are used to separate the grain and how a big bicycle like contraption is used to get water from the rivers into the fields she sings Vietnamese traditional work songs. The tour continues to the coliseum built in times gone by so the emperor could watch tiger and elephant fights, these were always rigged so the elephant would win, believing that the elephant represented the people. We pass some beautiful temples and finish at a pagoda an monastery still in use by the.oval Buddhist monks and admire the many beautiful bonsai tree's they are growing.

This evening we celebrated my birthday! As my true day of birth will be spent on a 14 hour night train. As you can imagine this involved, dinner, cake,happy birthday sang in 6 languages, flaming cocktails, and me dancing like an idiot!! Most likely a headache in the morning.