The 383 mile, 18 hour bus ride

And that was just one of four legs!  We left Cat Ba Island at 1:15 yesterday.  Took a boat to the harbor in Cat Ba, a boat to the harbor in Hai Phong, a bus to one bus station in Hai Phong, a smaller bus to another bus station in Hai Phong, hung out at KFC (thank goodness there was a KFC!) for three hours and then got on a sleeper bus to Hue.  We expected the sleeper bus (equipped with double decker beds) to land in Hue at 6am today but our actual arrival time was 1pm, making the trip a complete 24 hour feat!  We were the only non-Vietnamese on the overnight bus and it was a slow and interesting ride.  Many parts of the road were extremely bumpy and therefore extremely slow even though were on the main thoroughfare between north and south Vietnam.  Plus we made many a stops to pick up cargo - mail and such - that we transported with us.  It was an interesting experience but we are not sure we need to do it again.

We are liking Hue a lot.  We have seen it called a "sleepy city" in a few travel blogs but we think it's just a regular paced, comfortable city with usable sidewalks and crosswalks.  It is also the intellectual capital of Vietnam and is more manageable and clean than Hanoi.  I was wrong about it being the food capital - that is Hoi An, our next stop.  Sorry for the misinformation.  But it is home to Bun Bo Hue (Vietnamese soup that isn't Pho), which is a nice change of pace.  We haven't even wanted to each as much pho as we have been eating, but that is often just what they bring us when we say yes to "noodle soup" because we are tourists even though the person next to us is eating non-pho noodle soup.  We walked the Hue Citadel today, which was used during several Vietnamese dynasties and active well into the 20th century but then much of it was destroyed by US bombs during the Vietnam war.  They are actively working on restoring it and it was quite nice, but an interesting mixture of original buildings, leveled areas and new restoration.

We are still having camera issues.  It works OK in the air conditioned hotel rooms but not in the humid outdoors.  And believe it or not, all of the interesting things to photograph are actually not in our air conditioned hotels...