Huế, in case you aren’t too familiar with it, is pronounced ‘hWAY’ and that helps the title of this article make a bit more sense. I spent 8 days there after I left Hanoi, and I found a lot to like about the place, but in a manner I didn’t really expect.
Let me begin by mentioning that I arrived on one of the night trains from Hanoi, and even though my night train experience going to and from Sapa was pretty good, this one was fairly miserable so I am going to take as few of them as possible in the future.
After Tet in Hanoi I had the choice of a bottom bunk in a 6-bed sleeper cabin one week after, or I could wait an entire week more to get the bottom bunk in a 4-bed cabin. I had been in Hanoi for quite a while already so I chose the earlier train and figured I’d be asleep for most of the journey anyway.
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Unless there is something amazing out there that I have yet to hear about, Southeast Asia has exactly two attractions that should be considered for all of those Seven Wonders Of lists. The manmade one is the temples of Angkor Wat, near Siem Reap in Cambodia, which I’ve yet to visit as of this writing, and the natural one is Ha Long Bay (local spelling, sort of) near Hanoi in Vietnam. I’ve now been to Halong Bay and I’m pleased to report that it lives up to they hype.
In case you haven’t even heard of Halong Bay, it’s a bay that’s about 100km from Hanoi that is filled with almost 2,000 small islands, most of which are limestone. As you can see in the photos on this page, they are mostly tall and sticking out of the water in a pattern not seen many other places on earth. Also, the weather in the area seems to make the bay either misty or foggy nearly every day of the year, so most photos you’ll see have a slightly magical feeling, similar to the way that most photos of Machu Picchu in Peru show clouds below the city on the mountain’s peak.
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