Day 1:

This again was a fascinating place but completely different by what we have seen so far. Unfortunately as I already wrote before I busted my memory card through a virus and I had a sleepless night over all my missing pictures.
After all the story had a good end: I decided there must be solution and after 3.5 hours walking in the morning through the hottest city so far, talking to at least 8 people in 3 shops I found my "hero": he was a computer science student and recovered all my pictures! This little adventure cost me 40 $ and tears in my eyes, but I guess I would have paid anything. This is the shop you can trust:



So we had an afternoon till sunset for visiting the old town (citadelle old Hue). This was the emperors castle and yes, it was built for one. This area is soooo big and the parts that weren't destroyed through the different wars are great to see. It's good that there is a TV show that tells you a little bit about it in advance along with computer animation because parts are completely overgrown and hard to make out. You can see the efforts in renovating the place but don't expect European standards because you would be disappointed. All in all no matter where you turn around you have another perfect picture. I am glad that the days of filmrolls are over and we are all digital. The problem only is that you can't catch the wideness on a foto. =(
So this is just a building for the University of Arts (back then)



A cyclo driver brought us back to our hotel and he sweated quite a bit since we shared one bike. Megan always feels so sorry but when she realized that he got paid 3 times more than usual and the idea to bike instead of him calmed her down.
Oh ah, and we even met the emperor and the princess of course:



Since we are not afraid of anything we also tried the local speciality: CHE a mixture of one tablespoon of 14 ingrediences we all didn't have a clue what was in there besides banana and beans:



needless to mention that it rather looked like it was already in somebody elses mouth once it was mixed up - Megan resisted, we gave up after a bit.

Day 2:

We packed all our stuff and headed out early. The day was planned with biking to the emperor tombs and so we left our luggage at the open bus stop travel agency. This was a little challenge since my heart literally was stuck at every corner when I watched Megan with the big bike and the traffic and this all WITHOUT helmets, but since I trust my kids it all just turned out fine.


At the beginning a lady on a motorbike drove along with us talking to me about her family and lead us the way - I checked my map a couple of times and decided she didn't fool us so I started trusting her believing we will owe her to buy lunch at her restaurant. Coming out of the city the scenery was beautiful - ricefields all over and little villages with farmers living in small but nice little houses and kids "helloing" us from every corner. The lady BTW had decided to leave us in the middle of nowhere alone after I made clear that I won't pay her for guiding us since I wasn't actually looking for a guide.
I am sure most of the people we saw couldn't read or understand my map and there was many "Solly no English" but lots of friendliness and happiness and relaxation. (As I have mentioned before cardio vascular pharma products won't find a market here. =) )
We even managed all this and visited Tu Duc's tomb - hearing that he had 103 wives and many concubines and no offspring didn't make me empathetique knowing that he forced thousands to build his 1000m2 tomb area in 1864 and then when he (only 153cm tall!) died he didn't even get buried there instead the 200 servants who buried him elsewhere were beheaded.


The pagoda was only reached after another 16 km (including a little odyssey of 4 km) and a crazy railway bridge crossing (all the usual traffic: bikes and honking motos were pushing me from behind when I took this picture one-handed while biking....)



Pooped we ended up in the first and only sighted COOP supermarket and we rewared our ca 30km outing with dinner and ice cream.