We were lucky on our last southeast Asia travel journey that the rainy season only caught us once, in the city of Hue. Unfortunately it caught us in such a way that we ended up evacuating along with many other tourists, and did not see any sights of this former Vietnamese capital. Hue was one of the main cities Troy wanted to see on our return to Asia, and so we set aside 5 nights for exploration here.

The journey to Hue was via an 11.5 hour train ride from Nha Trang which surprisingly went by quite quickly! Copious amounts of snacks, podcasts, and videos played a large role. When we arrived in Hue we realised that we have officially entered mega hot temperatures, including some extreme humidity. Although Vietnam's climate is a little bit different, a lot of southeast Asia is at its hottest right now before it moves into the monsoon season. This is resulting in a lot more down time during the day for our poorly adapted North American bodies to recover, as dramatic as that sounds!

Hue has tons of attractions, although aside from its star attraction, the Citadel, many are not in the city centre. We hired a car for a couple of days to take us around, and this was worth every penny as we probably would have melted en route to try and get to them by walking or biking. The architectural highlights were fantastic, but our best story is an interaction with a group of local students who stopped us while we were walking along the river one afternoon. They asked us if they could take a few minutes of our time to practice their English as they were preparing for a test the next day. We have had this type of encounter several times in Asia, and it is always fun, as students ask us questions about where we are from, what our country is like, what our favourite foods are from their country, etc. These conversations usually last 5-10 minutes tops. But this time they were so excited about our help that they managed to keep us for 45 minutes on a bench going through all of their notebooks, and helping with pronunciation. They were hanging on to our every word, and making notes, and completely fascinated with our ideas. (Afterwards we said to each other that mostly all we could think about was how disgustingly sweaty we were and how could they possibly be willing to sit wedged in beside us for so long.) A man came by and asked to take a photo of us all, saying that he was so moved by the interactions he saw. A woman at a temple the next day stopped Troy and told him that she recognised us from when we were with the students and how lovely she thought the tutoring session was. We are famous in Hue! More importantly, we think they are going to ace the test!