Vietnam: Hue Tour in a House(boat) and Lots of Limestone

Happy Valentine's Day! Before we head out for our last Vietnamese meal, we thought we would take advantage of the free internet at our hotel to give a little update.

From Hoi An, we took a bus up the coast to the city of Hue, where we spent just one afternoon. On our way to lunch, we were approached by a young guy offering us a tour on his boat down the river to a famous pagoda. While we've declined literally thousands of other tour offers during our time in Vietnam, we didn't have much else planned for the afternoon. So we worked out a good price and headed for the boat. We quickly realized that it doubled as the family home, and so in order to take his house out on tour, our "guide" had to kick half his family out (the other half came along for the ride), throw clothes in the closet, and clean up lunch dishes. Although the tour itself wasn't necessarily all that informative (after getting the boat off its mooring & turning the driving over to his mother, our "guide" took a nap on the floor), it was an interesting insight into the life of one Vietnamese family.

From Hue, we took a quick flight up to Hanoi. Hanoi is a nice city with a lot of history and culture (we visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and saw a water puppetry performance), but its streets are incredibly narrow and are exceedingly busy right now due to the upcoming Tet festival. Our experience walking around the city led us to coin a new term: Hannoying (adj.) - the needless, excessive and loud honking of horns in the midst of a complete and total gridlock of motos, cars, street peddlers, bicycles, pedestrians, and scared-out-of-their-wits tourists.

Thankfully, the next day brought a refreshing break from crowded Hanoi as we journeyed up to Halong Bay. We did an overnight cruise on a very cool boat with only six passengers and got to spend the afternoon kayaking among the magnificent limestone karst islands (oh, how Gus wished he had his climbing gear). Our cruise manager was great and we learned a lot not just about Halong Bay but about many aspects of Vietnamese life. Language has definitely been a barrier in having many meaningful conversations with a lot of the other Vietnamese people that we've met, so it was great to get to ask him all the questions we've gathered up over the past few weeks.

Tomorrow we set off for Hong Kong. While we're looking forward to the next part of our adventure, we are definitely sad to be leaving Vietnam behind (not to mention Vietnamese food).

Could you imagine a more typical Vietnamese scene? We found out that a typical rice-farming family makes about $600 per year and is allocated their land by the local communist party office every five years.


The youngest inhabitant of our "tourboat." She liked the game "gather up all the shoes into a pile and kick it."


Tet is celebrated with Kumquat Trees. Above is a strong contender in our "Best Of" category: craziest-thing-carried-on-a-moto. This one was only average-sized.


The karst islands of Halong Bay were incredible in the mist.