Day 3 - Hue

This morning started with a nice buffet breakfast on the 3rd level of our hotel, I drank a lot of orange juice and ate a lot of bacon, sausages and some eggs.

After breakfast we had a short break before making our way to checkout and then head to the van to Hue, approximately a 2 hour drive Da Nang. On the van ride we met a man who lives in Hoyan, his English was pretty good, his name was Phong, turns out he was a law professor and spent sometime in Australia, but never had a chance to visit New Zealand. Along the way we stopped for about 10 to 15 minutes to pick up a couple of other passengers, while the driver waited for them to arrive he was out washing the van to keep it all clean, surprising considering we still had another 45 minutes or so ahead of us.

We arrived at our hotel "The White Lotus" around 12pm, unlike the show, where early arrivals usually mean trouble, our early check-in at The White Lotus has only led to a warm welcome and an extra couple of hours of sight seeing, hopefully our stay here is a lot more pleasant for us than the guests we see in the TV version.

We took a walk around part of the city, heading towards the river to start, coming across some photos hanging up, with the theme something like "Vietnam via International photography", not sure on the exact wording... But some of the photos were really cool, photos below are not mine, but photos of the two I liked most

After this we decided to get some food, we roamed the streets for about an hour looking for something to eat, along the way popping into a pharmacy to get something for this cough that still won't go away as well as some sunscreen, afterall skin protection is important and it is also 33°C today.

I wanted to get some cash out, as you never know when you made need some, thankfully I haven't needed any yet as most places take cards, but if you do find a little market, I can only assume they won't. Finally after finding 3 different ATM's I finally found one that accepted my card as the first 2 rejected it pretty quickly. I can now say I'm a multi millionaire after taking out 2,000,000 from my account, equivalent to about NZD $130.

As we roamed the streets, we would often see these smallish cars with a V on them, Gill had asked Phong (the guy from the van ride) what the company was, turns out its a Vietnamese company who specialise in Electric cars. We aren't 100% sure if all their cars are electric or just a larger portion of them.

We eventually found somewhere to eat, ended up being a cinema restaurant of all places, but it was the only place around we could find. For the 4 of us it cost around 334,000, that included 4 drinks and 4 meals, grand total in NZD $21.38. Can't argue with that... People have told me it's cheap, but it still blows my mind how cheap. We then headed back to the hotel so we could get our bags up to our rooms, have a quick relaxation and then head up to the Roof Bar for a cocktail.

The rain had started bucketing down by this stage, and despite the rain, the temperature outside was still warmer than inside. I had a nice banooffie flavoured cocktail, after which I headed downstairs to check out the pool and the gym.

The pool water was nice and warm, but in the end I decided to get to the gym and do a light workout, the gym had all the gear I would normally use, however did lack some extra weights, I spent some time on the treadmill where I started sweating pretty quickly, then I moved over to the leg press, starting pretty light for the first set as I hadn't done a weights session in a month... That felt pretty light so I maxed out the weights (basically used every plate they had) which was still lighter than what I normally do back home... Well, was I in for a rude awaking, either I'm that tired from all the travel, or I've lost a heap of strength in the last 4 weeks. I still managed a couple of sets, but it wasn't as easy as I was use to.

I then went upstairs back to the Bar where I found the others still sipping away at some cocktails. We stayed to see the sun setting which caused some nice rays of sunshine coming up from behind the mountains, granted may not look so good in the photos, but in person was pretty nice.

From there we decided to head out for dinner, Mike had found a place about 500 meters down the road called Viet Spice, 3 of us had the duck while James decided to have beef. It was an enjoyable meal and as with food in Vietnam, very cheap. When then headed back to the hotel while detouring into a small market, looked like they were just setting up food stalls, we had already eaten, so it want something I was too keen on trying. Popped into a small Crafts store where there were different types of crafts there, purses, Vietnamese hats, etc, then continued on out way back to the hotel. Walking along the way I spotted a blizzard climbing up the wall and happened to mention it to the others, Mike came back to take a look as I carried on facing away from where I was heading, hearing a massive crunch under foot, thinking I must have stool of an egg of some kind I lifted my shoe only to find I had crushed a giant Snail... Then it was back to the hotel to rest as we have a very early morning start tomorrow.