Hue: The name says it all

Between Hoi An and Hue, the next stop on our Vietnam tour, there is a highway called the Hai Van Pass, a route of roads and train track that hug the green mountains and the South China sea. If you've seen the Top Gear Vietnam special episode (where they ride motorbikes up Vietnam and turn them into boats in Halong Bay) you'll have seen bits of it.

We decided that a day train was the best way to travel, but due to the rain we couldn't see a whole lot out of the window.

The rain followed us to Hue and cursed us for most of our stay there, which was a shame because rain tends to make places seem worse than they are.

After loving Hoi An, Hue didn't really tickle our collective pickle so we were glad to only be staying one night.

We had booked another night train for when we left Hue, but there were no beds left so we had to settle for seats for a journey that would start at 5.30pm and finish at 6am, but more on that later.

On our second day we thought we should probably do something cultural, so we booked ourselves onto a day tour around the city. First stop was the Imperial City, then a Pagoda (Vietnamese temple) and we also went to a house made out of wood with natural air conditioning, which our tour guide seemed pretty impressed with. 

After lunch we got back on the bus only to be informed that we had to pay more money in entrance fees ontop of the extra we paid earlier. We were having none of it, so decided for the next three temples we would walk around outside them and take photos and save ourselves some Dong. We had to stick with the tour because they were giving us a lift to the train station!

Amy taking pictures of the temple through a gap in the door

So the time came for the dreaded night train with no bed. We arrived at the station and Marc and Gareth headed off to find somewhere that sold food and drink, and returned with a bag full of beer cans and a block of ice which the man guaranteed would keep the beer chilled until 8pm.

As expected, the train journey was pretty shocking. We only got a few hours sleep and poor Amy got some sort of stomach bug and ended up making regular trips to the toilet to be sick!