Picked up from our hotel at 7AM in another motorbike-sidecar-Tuk-Tuk, we go to the bus station. We sit and watch lots of nice-looking double-decker buses around. We wonder which one is ours, when an old, turquoise coach pulls up. We get on and sit at the very back. The bus isn't the cleanest, it's very smelly, and it looks like it is a bus for locals. No tourists are on it at all except for us. Despite this, I remain optimistic...Rachelle, less so. I'm sure the next 12 hours to Hue in Vietnam will fly by.
The locals keep staring at us. You'd think that after the eleventh or twelfth stare they would have seen enough of our white faces, but no. Some spit intermittently out of the windows along the way. There's also a bag with something square in it next to us that keeps chirping; it's a bird in a bird cage. At one point a stupid woman sat on it thinking it was just a box, and the cage was squashed. I imagine the bird was pretty upset about the bus journey and I felt sorry for it.
Our journey wasn't going great either. The back seat was full and a Laoatian lady in a thick cardigan kept leaning heavily on Rachelle. I was squashed up against the window and the bumpy roads kept smashing my elbow into it. At one point, we stop for a 'toilet break' in the middle of nowhere. All the men get out and start peeing in full view beside the bus. When in Asia, do as the asians do - I join them. The women do their thing on the other side of the bus. Rachelle doesn't join them.
As the bus gets fuller, people start having to sit on the floor at our feet and lie on our bags. They are all staring and laughing. We hear them say "Phalong" a lot, which we know means 'foreigner'. None of them speak English, but they still try to talk to us. We shrug our shoulders. One gross looking guy who kept smoking out the back window and who particularly didn't seem to be able to keep his eyes off us, managed to say "very beautiful" to Rachelle. Giving the 12 hour nature of the trip, and all the accumulated annoyances, I'll admit it made me bitter; the straw that broke the camel's back.
Rachelle hates the journey as much as I do. It was quite horrendous to be honest, but we arrive in Hue...Kinda. We actually arrive near to Hue. They throw us off 4km away for some reason and we have no idea where to go. We pick up our heavy bags and within seconds there are men on mopeds telling us they will take us into town for $5. Not only is that a ridiculous price for a 4km journey, but I don't know how they expected to take us when we both have our huge travel bags and backpacks. Despite rejecting them, they don't leave us alone and we have to run away.
Making our way on foot to Hue worried us, but after a while a taxi finally pulled up and we negotiated $2 to the road we pointed out from a map in our Lonely Planet. We chose a guesthouse called 'Halo' from the book, but the taxi driver didn't seem to know it, so he just dropped us off on the road. We can't seem to find Halo when a woman from a place called 'Google Hotel' sees us with our bags and makes her sales pitch. She claims that her hotel is Halo guesthouse, but that she changed the name. We are both sceptical of this, but desperate, so we agree to view the room. In the end, the place looks amazing and does actually fit the description of Halo in the Lonely Planet. Maybe she was telling the truth. Lovely clean rooms with television, air-conditioning, mini-bar, breakfast included and free internet: All for 380,000 Dong. Things were starting to look up.
We explore an area of restaurants and bars. Hue is a nice city and far more developed than anything in Lao. Furthermore, the food is cheap. I order a burger with egg, bacon, cheese and salad, and Rachelle gets a burger too. After a cocktail each, we are shattered, and go back to our lovely room.
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