We do almost nothing but travel all day to Da Nang. This is the roughest travel day yet. There is only one sight seeing stop, which is the Tay Son family home. More historical sight seeing, not much too write about here.
On the way to Hue, we stop in Hoi An. There is a silk factory, where it's kinda neat to find out that they harvest silk by boiling the silkworm coccoons. There is a Hoi An ancient town, but Joe is the only one that wants to see it. The rest of us shop around town.
Most of the trip to Hue today is through the mountains. The scenery was quite nice . We traveled alongside the ocean amongst some cliffs. The sharp turns look like they would be conducive to rallying...I think the bus driver has a fear of braking, because we hit some of these turns pretty hard. Maybe he was trying to three wheel it.
As we enter the Hue, or central, region of Vietnam, the accents here are incredible...incredibly difficult to understand. In Vietnam, there are three distinct accents: Northern, Southern, and Central. Northern is considered the "proper" or "formal" way to speak. Southern is just like the Southern accent in the US: kinda lazy-like, but easy to understand. Central is just god-awful. I liken the Central accent to a Scottish or Cockneyed British accent. Sure, it's technically English, but I don't have a damn clue what you just said.
In the evening, we take a cruise on the Huong River, or Perfume River. On the boat, there are Hue performers singing traditional regional music, and playing some of the craziest instruments I've ever seen. One lady had tea cups, and another guy played a dan bau, which is a Vietnamese monochord. The weird thing is that the pitch changes not by shortening the length of the string like a guitar, but by tightening or loosening the string. Very interesting.
Hue is the only town where we get to spend two nights in a row in the same place. It's nice to not have to pack up in the morning. We spend the day visiting some mausoleums and tombs. Nothing of note, except that at one of the mausoleums, Kiet buys a coconut bigger than his head. Even the locals are amused at the comparison.
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