Hanging On and Made it to Hue

Well, todays post is going to pick up last night right after my last post. Unfortunately I have managed to contract some form of travellers’ diarrhea, which caused me to vomit 5 times last night, as well as suffer some serious diarrhea. I have somewhat recovered at this point, and am hoping that with a good night’s sleep I will be right as rain tomorrow. It’s been a rough day due to the sickness so I don’t have much to report.

We travelled to Hue today, which involved a 3 hour bus ride that I attempted to sleep for most of. It was a fairly scenic drive through some of the mountains, and I got some nice views of the sea and bays below.

The problem with the drive though was the small windy road that we were travelling on.  At one point we were driving perfectly safely on our side of the road when we round a curve and a truck is passing another truck by using our lane. The truck only barely swerved out of the way in time. I don’t think I would ever be able to drive in Vietnam.

We made it to Hue, and I still wasn’t feeling great, so instead of traveling with the group to Hue University, I spent the afternoon attempting to recover at the hotel. Since I don’t have much else to cover in this post I’ll talk about the differences between American and Vietnamese hotels. The first thing you notice is that in each of the hotels we have had to put our key into a slot to activate power in the room. I think this is a brilliant idea to help conserve energy, for some of the more absent minded folks.

Next you come to the bathroom where they have the usual amenities, such as soap, shampoo, and a shower cap. They also have toothbrushes and toothpaste, a sewing kit, a comb, and cotton sticks. It’s crazy because I was expecting fewer amenities not more from Vietnam. Another thing about bathrooms is next to each toilet you have a hose with a spray end on it, presumably to help you clean up after using the toilet. Everything else is fairly standard, except one nice thing is our hotels have offered complimentary bottled water, but other than that the room basically resembles an American hotel room.

I managed to make it out to dinner with the group where I enjoyed a small meal of rice, I’m glad I was able to rejoin the group because we were able to meet with Hugh, a de-miner who lives here in Hue. His job is to oversee the process of removing left over ordinance from the war. He talked about some of the brutal truths about how the mines have affected people here. Apparently the government offers no assistance to anyone injured by a leftover mine, so sometimes you will visit a rice field where the people will be farming around land mines because they are afraid to touch them. One of the interesting effects that Hugh also mentioned was that a lot of farmers would plant their rice 20 cm down rather than the optimal 40 cm down, which is causing the soil to be used up much quicker than it should be. It’s just crazy how much of a residual effect these mines are having on the people here.

Tomorrow I hope to be back to full participation, and I have started to feel better this evening so I’m optimistic. We plan to do a river cruise and tour the tombs of the old emperors tomorrow which I’m really excited about. We spend most of the day tomorrow here in Hue and then head to Hanoi tomorrow evening. I’ll let you know how everything goes.