We left the hotel early to get the train, we boarded the train on the hard coach (wooden seats) as there were no soft left. The train was full of locals looking at us funny because hardly any tourists get the hard seats. During the journey we were treated like celebrities, everyone on the coach gathered around to ask us questions but we had no idea what they were asking in Vietnamese, there was one guy who spoke a little English who sat next to us and translated but it was still difficult to understand. Women were feeling my legs and my beard and everyone kept giving us food, fruit, sweets etc. And they even offered to buy us lunch but we said we'd buy our own. They assumed we couldn't eat with chopsticks so made us eat our lunch with soup spoons that was very tricky.Everyone was buying dried squid which stank really bad and we prayed no one offered us any (luckily nobody did). When we got to our station everyone on the carriage stood up to shake our hands which was really cool, defiantly a highlight.

In Hue we got a taxi to the hotel and laid underneath the air con for a while. After this we walked to the citadel but when we got near it started raining VERY heavily, it was so heavy that it just went straight through our rain coats and everything in our bags got soaked even though we had a waterproof cover on it. We didn't even get to see the citadel because you can't see anything when it rains. Walking back you couldnt even see the difference between the road and the pavement. We dried off then went out for something to eat to a little restaurant selling local food, it was really good.

The next day we did a tour That cost a whole $5 and we started with a river boat ride stopping along the way to visit temples and pagodas. They were very nice as the city is renown for it temples. One was a whole complex that eventually leads to a big hill where a man is buried but after going all the way through we discovered it is forbidden to go to the hill but the rest was still pretty. We also went to another where they had statues that resembled the terracotta warriors and inside it was full of old Vietnamese army men in full uniform also on a sightseeing trip of their country. We also had lunch on the boat as it sailed down the river which consisted of noodles and tofu which they seem to love around here. I had never once had tofu before coming here and now we eat it every other day. In the afternoon we decided not to go into a mausoleum you had to pay extra for so we sat in a little cafe to wait for the rest of the group we tried some sugar cane juice which was really really yummy! After this we went to a village that makes insence sticks and Grainne bought a Vietnamese hat for $3. After the tour we went for some food at the same place as last night and bought some cloth art from a man we had seen about 15 times trying to sell art, we managed to get one of ha long bay which was lucky as we never saw ha long bay art again.

We then headed for our night train. When we got on, there was some people sat on our seat/bed so had to get them to move for some reason us showing them are ticket against the numbers to prove they were ours didn't get them to move. Eventually a ticket conductor came down and kicked the ones with no tickets off the train. There were still 3 with actual tickets and allocated beds which made for a awkard uncomfortable compartment as it was easy to tell they were mad at us. It was so silly because if they had got off our beds we wouldnt care if there were extra people in the compartment- some people here are just really rude. The beds weren't that bad they were actually really comfy and length wise it wasn't too bad. The old woman with the people who had got kicked off had also stolen our pillows and sheets for herself we realized when settling down to sleep, it didn't really bother us as we had sleep sheets and small pillows stolen from the plane but still its the principal and the fact that we had paid about 60 pounds for the privilege of this train-in hindsight we should've just got tourist buses to places as it would've saved us a lot of money. So we made ourselves a nuisance by talking and then We then watched the Vietnam top gear special -it was still only about 8 o'clock whilst this woman was trying to sleep with her 3 pillows and 3 blankets and finally we went to sleep.