We stepped on the train in Loa Cai at seven and slept hard through the night in our private sleeper car. At four in the morning we got off the train in Hanoi. We found a taxi and negotiated a price to the airport. Up to this point in the trip, we felt that we had come to grasp the counterintuitive logic that structures the flow of traffic in Vietnam. Whereas in the west, we drive fast and straight, keeping more or less within our given lane, obeying traffic signals, etc., in Vietnam, they drive slowly and constantly, flowing together in currents of traffic that merge and separate much as the currents of a river. Although this seemed at first chaotic and dangerous, we found that drivers seemed much more highly attuned to their surroundings and in the rare case of a collision, the vehicles would be moving so slowly that damages would be minimal. In fact, we would later witness one such accident in downtown Saigon in which a young fella on a motorbike was struck by an SUV and though he did fall off his bike, he jumped immediately to his feet, a still burning cigarette hanging from his lips, took a drag, brushed himself off, waived away the approaching traffic cop, got back on his bike and sped away.
However, our taxi driver on the early morning in Hanoi broke all of our preconceived notions with regard to the accepted rules of the road in Vietnam. At one point, I glanced nervously over at the speedometer to see the needle quivering around 150 km/h, just before we careened into the right hand shoulder around a plodding eighteen wheeler. The grand finale of our harrowing drive came as we approached the airport terminal and Tara, concerned that we were heading to the international terminal, leaned forward and said, "We're going to Hue." The driver turned around, wild eyed, slammed on the brake and came to a complete stop in the middle of the onramp. He grabbed our plane ticket from her hands and scanned it rapidly, tossed it back at us and laid on the gas, the wheels screeching and burning beneath us. "Vietnam Air, this way!" he said and sure enough, he dropped us off right at our gate, in about half the time that it should have taken to get there. Guess that's what you get for settling on a fixed price before heading out to your destination. "Good luck!" he waved as we put on our bags and headed off to find our flight.
We landed in Hue at six in the morning where we had arranged for a driver to pick us up and take us on a tour of the city before transferring us to our fancy resort at China Beach. What we didn't know was that we had apparently purchased an entire Mercedes-Benz mini-bus with a driver who spoke about as much English as we did Vietnamese. If we could just have split the difference between that bus and all the various vehicles we'd been crammed into on the trip, so far, it would have evened out quite nicely. And so began our magical mystery tour of the ancient imperial city of Hue and the central Vietnamese coastline. With no idea of where we were heading, we followed the instructions of our driver as he dropped us off at an assortment of interesting sites. "You go here. See the citadel." He said, and we found ourselves at the 17th century imperial enclosure, a moated fortress compound filled with the ornate temples and palaces of the Nguyen Dynasty. We visited a towering pagoda and a sprawling complex of tombs and temples built for the emperor in a beautiful pine tree forest along the banks of the perfume river.
After we had wandered around the outskirts of Hue, our driver headed south along the rugged mountain coastline. We stopped at the peak of Hai Van pass and hiked up to an old French battalion that had been used as a bunker by the American army during the war. The old brick buildings were pock marked with bullet holes and the place had an eerie, haunted feeling even as the vast ocean beneath us shimmered in the mid day sun all the way to the horizon.
Our driver dropped us off at the Furama resort, one of the swankiest places we would be staying on our trip. It was a luxurious, beach from resort that felt a world away from the most recent leg of our journey which had seen us sleeping on trains and staying in modest backpacker accommodations. We were quite pleased to be back in full on honeymoon mode and took full advantage of our decadent digs. Unfortunately, it was my turn to get the stomach bug and so, ironically, Tara and I were both knocked out of commission by the food our two fancy hotels, while all the local food we ate on the trip treated us just fine. Fortunately, I brought along some antibiotics and was back at it in no time. The beach was pristine and we spent many long hours lounging beneath our palm thatched umbrella, staring out into the ocean, just enjoying our time together.
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