Arrived in hue early doors and booked a room at hue backpackers. I had museli, fruit and yogurt for breakfast, sososo good, missed that stuff. After a little chill time Emma and I went exploring, we went to the imperial city where the nygenen dynasty used to live before it was all destroyed in the American war. The area has actually been destroyed in 3 different wars which is awful. The Vietnamese are currently doing a lot of restoration work on the site to recreate how it used to be. We saw before and after pictures, of how it used to look (after it was destroyed), how it looks now, and how it will look once restoration is complete. It was beautiful but I kind of preferred the ruins, I think it was more powerful seeing the destruction with bullet holes still in the wall etc. rather than the buildings in all their splendour beforehand.

Whilst Emma and I were wandering around looking for the citydel, some tukTuk men tried to take advantage of us, they lied and said that it was closed for lunch and they would take us around the city until then. They got rather annoyed at us but we politely declined and went on our merry way. We got to the citydel and paid our entrance fee, funnily enough it was not closed for lunch. Once inside we had a look around and saw all the buildings that remained, originally there was something like 200 buildings, and after the wars, there were only 12 or something ridiculous, I need to check my facts on that one though. We watched a video which explained all the restoration work, unfortunately though my blood sugar levels had dropped and I fell asleep during it, so we went for ice creams. One of my favourite buildings was the royal theatre, I found the masks and the opulence of it fascinating, different colours on the masks that the actors wore represented personality traits of the character they were portraying, eg yellow being honesty and red being charming (they aren't exact, just examples).

Once back at the hostel we went down the road and ate at a restaurant named gecko. The best food ive had since I've been in vietnam. The noodles and chicken had a kick and were so flavoursome. Then we had an evening in the hostel bar, and recruited our biker hang for the following day.

Unfortunately this was the evening where Natalie got a little overexcited and I left my lonely planet guide and clean washing in the bar area. Luckily all items were recovered as they had been put behind reception and in the book switch area.