Andrew Pell: Hue & the DMZ

After 5 days in Hoi An I headed north to a place called Hue (pronouced Hway). It was a very scenic 4 hour bus journey into the old capital of Vietnam. I checked into a $9 hotel and organised a halfday motorbike tour through the yummy cafe next door. I spent the afternoon wandering around Hue and visited the ancient Citadel where i watched what i think was a rehearsal for some celebration. Lots of marching, colour and noise!
The next morning I jumped on the back of a motorbike for a tour around the sights of Hue. It was extremely nice to be driven through some remote parts out of the Hue town where you coud really see how the Vietnamese people live. John & Dave a couple of lads from London were also on seperate bikes doing the same tour. The tour finished around 1pm where it was back to the cafe for some well earnt lunch and beer as it was 38 degrees and extremely sticky. In the afternoon I headed to the Citadel for another look and then had some very cheap beers at the Why Not Bar.
The next day I felt like i was back in Melbourne on a winters day. Yep it turned nasty, 19 degrees and it rained all day! A bit of a shock from the day before. The 3 of us decided to hire a car with driver and a tour guide to take us around the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) which is a good hour north of Hue. It was probably the best place to be on such a wet day, being driven around the countryside with a few stops along the way. We stopped at an American war base where there was hardly anything left, cemetries of the Vietnamese soldiers & the Vinh Moch Tunnels where the Viet Cong lived underground. The tunnels were a lot larger than the Cu Chi Tunnels in Saigon and our tour guide had us underground for around 45mins showing us how they lived relatively comfortably. Around the tunnels you could still see American bomb craters as this was an area that they unloaded all of their amunition on the way back to their base.
Hue was a nice place as there weren't thousands of tourists everywhere and it was interesting to see some of the contryside that is still regenerating from all the Agent Orange America had previously dumped here.