25 June 2004 - Hoi An, Vietnam

Motorbikes, bus rides, and bowel movements. Eating street food has finally caught up with me and when I arrived in Hue from Hanoi I was pretty sick. From the beginning.

When I got back from Cat Ba Island I met this Canadian named Sarah at dinner and it turns out that the two of us are going in the same general direction direction. We hung out for a few days and went to check out a few areas in Hanoi and spent a day at the water park cooling off while we waited for our Cambodian visas. We also went to a couple of clubs and watched a show on the Red River. We left for Hue on Monday by overnight bus.

Hue is a town on the coast about 300 miles south of Hanoi. It is the old imperial capital and also the best jumping point for exploring the old demilitarized zone from the Vietnam War. Not a terribly exciting place in reality, but worth stopping for a day or two. Anyway, on the bus there I started to get pretty sick was really looking forward to the irregular bus stops so I could run outside to find a hole to squat over. We got to Hue at 7:30 the next morning and I quickly found a room with A/C and a good sturdy toilet.

It only lasted about 12 hours and the next day I ran around Hue to check out the Forbidden City inside the Citidel. The Forbidden City was built in the early 1800's in the classic Chinese style. The interesting part about this site is that it is in total disrepair from war, fire, and weather so your imagination can go nuts imagining what the place must have looked like.

The next day I got a motorbike and rode 80 kilometers north to the DMZ. The entire roadside is littered with graves or somber monuments, often placed right on top of active farmland. While over 100 million tons of explosives were dropped on the area, a normal life of farming and car watching has returned to the locals near highway 1. Highway 9 which is west of where I was is supposedly a different story, but I ran out of time. I did get to see the tunnels of Vinh Moc where thousands of VC soldiers and their famlies lived inside a hill north of the Ben Hai River.


This morning we left for Hoi An a few hours south of Hue. It was a very hot day to be traveling and the temperature is mid 90's with mind-numbing humididty. Like the Little Train That Could, our ascent up the mountain played out as a chapter in "The Crappy Bus That Quit In the Middle of Nowhere". We did finally manage to make it here and right now I am sitting under a fan drinking one liter of water per hour. That's right Farva... it comes in liters here!