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Another Year Over, A New Ones Just Begun!

We decided that we would take the overnight train from Hanoi to Hue.  It was like being back in India again but the compartment was much more confined and not as lively!  We are currently travelling with Amy from London and Joel from Oz, we met both of them in Hanoi so it's nice to have some company.  The train took 12 hours but we have found out that if we had booked an open ticket on the bus we could have done it a lot cheaper!  We've booked open tickets from now on.
 
Hue used to be the old royal capital of Vietnam and I'm sure that it would have been lovely if the weather hadn't had been so awful!  Our first day was spent discovering the town and viewing the Citadel that housed what is left of the old royal complex.  In 1969, our friends the Americans blew most of the complex to bits but it was good to see some Vietnam heritage, well what was left of it.
 
New Years Eve was spent in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) visiting key sites of the Vietnam War.  The highlights of the tour included the bridge over Ben Hai river that was used to mark the divide between the North and South, the American Khe Sanh base (what was left of it)  that had some very amusing captions under pictures of the battle there and of the war, you have got to love Communism!  We also saw the Rockpile, an American base that could only be accessed by helicopter.  The most destressing part was that the whole area around the base was covered in Agent Orange and you can see that the area is slowly growing back to how it was in the past.  The best part was exploring the Vinh Moc tunnels that were built by the Vietnamese to avoid the American bombers and provide supplies to the Viet Cong in the South.  We went a total of 23 metres underground and I have no idea how they did it because there was no way that I could have lived down there!  We met a man who had lived down the tunnels who lost his hearing because of the explosions of American bombs that were dropped on the area.  Whole families lived in 1 metre by 1.5 metre by 1 metre cubes dug off the tunnels and I can't remember the number of children born down in the tunnels.  The whole place was a real eye-opener!
 
We had to get up at 05:30 to go on the trip and so when we got back at 17:00 we were unsure if we would make it to midnight.  Off course we did but strangely enough we ended up in the DMZ Bar!  The bar was full of Westerners and we even bumped into the Australians we had met on the Halong Bay trip so it was cool to party with them.  Everyone did the countdown to midnight, the bar staff set off big party popper things and I have never kissed and hugged so many random people in my life!  As the party carried on all this free food kept being passed round which was great and I partied until about 03:00 before grabbing a cyclo home and crashing to bed. 

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