The LOOOONG Trip South!

National Park
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All right, some of you might have been getting brief and scattered e-mails from both of us recently and been interested with what was going on. Well, we had hit a wall. We were tired, hungry, hot, and mostly fed up! After coming down from the cool mountains of Northern Vietnam we found ourselves in a small town called Ninh Binh. This town is known for a beautiful National Park called Cat Ba, about an hour outside of town, which we spent a day visiting and it was very nice (complete with a full monkey rescue and rehab center). Yet, the town its self didn't feel very welcoming to tourists (as no one wanted to have anything to do with us), there were no restaurants (so we were stuck eating from our guesthouse, good for them bad for us), and it was hot as hell! It was as hot as Phoenix in the Summer plus 90% humidity, thank god for our little room's air con!

Suz cooling herself off in the creek
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We had very little to do so we spent a good amount of time on the internet. We quickly got train tickets heading South to Hue. We had read in our book that the bus trip to Hue was notoriously horrible, so we felt that we had one up on the situation as we boarded the train at 6pm.  Thankfully the train was not very crowded and I was able to have my own two seats. HA!, we should have known better. Around 2 am I was awoken by a Vietnamese man yelling at us to get out of his family's seats. He was mean! The look on his face and the ton in his voice indicated that he was using some choice words.  So we both had to get up and wake the cute couple that were in are seats and they had to wake the couple that were in there seats and so forth. I made sure to point at the mean old guy and explain in english (even though we were the only tourists on the entire train and were made to know that by all of the stares) that he had made us do this to them. In a funny way I think we understood each other as all four of us gave mean looks to the man. Jerk!

Estimated, don't you love that word, so vag and yet allows the costumer to hope for an early arrival.

Ants go marching
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Other then being unbelievably uncomfortable in now the most crowded train i have every seen, we really did not sleep at all. I was reassured to the idea that we only had to be in that stupid train until 7am, our estimated arrive time. Estimated, don't you love that word, so vag and yet allows the costumer to hope for an early arrival.  Anyways, around 7am they were serving up breakfast, always a plus in my book. But we quickly declined the meal. As the cart was getting closer I grew happy with the smell of hard boiled eggs. While Peter grew agitated (as most of you know pete hates eggs). It was a bowl with egg, some green lettuce, and salt. Yet as it neared I saw that it was not a boiled egg at all!  The lady was cracking what ever the contents of the egg were into the bowl. Trying to identify the substance i realized it was not egg as we know it at all. I was horrified! No kidding what I saw come out of the egg was a fetus!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Developed little wings and all!  I couldn't believe my eyes, and Peter was so shocked that he refused to even look at it being served.

Suzo
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I looked at the book a few days later and found that a common meal is a duck fetus cracked into a bowl with salt and greens! No kidding. Don't even ask how they eat it, I don't want to know.

When we finally departed the train at 12:00pm (making our trip 17 hours in total), we went right to the hotel and slept! By far the worst three day of are trip! By the way Hue was nice, they had good food. Enjoy the photos.