The train to Hue was fine; uncrowded but warm even though we paid for an AC car. The 3 hour ride was partially spent watching the gamecast of the PSU game. Both on this trip and the train trip from Nimh Binh to Dong Hoi we saw miles and miles of flooding from last week’s tropical storms; none of this is supposed to be water!

Our AirBNB had sent a taxi and our room is nice and big even though we do not have the view of the river we were promised. The heavy rains last week leaked through the ceiling and the walls and the reserved room was being repaired. We went to the Dong Ba Market which was closing up just as we got there. That is ok; they were pretty aggressive sellers. So we walked around a bit and ended up at the DMZ Bar for dinner. Notice the rifles with the flowers in them hanging from the ceiling.

Yes we are now in South Vietnam and the DMZ is very close here. We have heard the DMZ tour is very boring except for the Vin Moc tunnels but that is last and you have to be on the bus all day to get there. Instead, we invited Katya along who we ran into on the street and made arrangements with a local guide who was associated with our AirBNB to take a motor scooter ride to the country. Wow….what a day. We totally threw the tourist map away  and rode through tiny villages, over dikes between the rice paddies, through flooded areas, through mud, through no road at all!

We visited a farming museum where a 78 year old woman showed us how they separate and grind rice. She was fabulous.

This Japanese covered bridge reminded us of Pennsylvania.

We had Vietnamese coffee riverside then rode quite a distance, hopped on a boat, and toured the lagoon for about 30 minutes. The lagoon is home to many fish farms and people who lived on their boats until the government stepped in and built them houses about 10 years ago. Some of them eschewed the houses and still live on the boat.

Our boat dropped us off at a restaurant that was in the middle of the lagoon. This is no tourist trap; this was the real thing. We had fish pancakes and hot pot with shrimp and squid.  The food was delicious but you had to be careful where you walked because some of the bamboo flooring was quite “iffy”.

We visited a local family to learn how the Banh chung ( a rice cake made from glutinous rice and mung beans) was made and we were given a gift of a Bahn Tet which we will sample at dinner tonight. The Vietnamese eat these for breakfast. We had them at dinner and one small piece (in Buzz’s case, a small bite) was enough.

We also stopped at a house and borrowed their boat to catch little fish by net to feed to the chickens. We stopped to see temples and rice paddies and water buffalo. We left the hotel at about 9am and returned at about 5pm. What a glorious, tiring, magnificent, can’t stop smiling day!!

We spent out last day in Hue waiting for the pouring rain to stop, then exploring The Citadel, whose grounds house The Imperial City built in the early 1800’s for a self-proclaimed Emperor. Unfortunately out of 160 original buildings, only 10 buildings made it through the “American” war. It was deemed a UNESCO historical site in 1993 and the Vietnamese are doing a great job in protecting and restoring the gorgeous buildings.

Vietnam is so interesting; if you speak candidly with a Vietnamese person, they will tell you they really dislike the Chinese yet the Chinese ruled for 100’s of years so the cultures and architecture are so intertwined. The place is huge….covers 1300 acres, so it took a few hours to cover most of it.

Then lunch at a riverside restaurant helped us knock a few Hue specialties off our list: Nem Liu (pork meat wrapped around lemon grass skewers, wrapped in rice paper with added greens and dipped in a peanut sauce), fried frog, pork and fig and shrimp plate.