The Graves of the Motorcycle

Vietnam, the land of the motorcycles, lawless streets and a love of honking. Honking when you pass someone, honking when you cross a street, honking when you see someone you know...

It's a bit like Venezuela really, motorbikes and buses stampeding all about in Lion King like manner.

After being hit ourselves whilst on foot in Hanoi, surrounded in Sigh Gone, and being berated by constant honking the entirety of our trip, Kelly and I felt like we were ready for the impossible:

Our OWN motorbikes! We wanted to join in on the fun! 

 We were to join the herd! (Warning: While I may use the word "herd" I in no way imply that there was order and a pattern to the chaos that are the streets of Vietnam)

Kelly and I may be a bit crazy, but we decided to not sign our own death warrants and thus waited for lovely Hue of central Vietnam to have our first motorbike venture instead of the death traps of Saigon and Hanoi. 

We woke up fairly early on our first day in Hue and of course firstly made our way over to a cafe to get breakfast (My stomach then roared in approval while scarfing down moderately tasty backpacker cafe banana pancakes). 

After filling the beast, it was time to attempt to mount a different kind of beast. 

    Scary, right?

We returned to our hostel and told our little manager man that we wanted to rent two motorbikes. He thought we were crazy that we wanted no guide, that we didn't want to go on a tour, and that we were each getting our own motorbike. Hahaha. He doesn't know the bamfness of the Pearson sisters. 

So there we were in our little back alley of our hostel, Kelly had the manual bike and was receiving a quick 2 minute instruction while I sat there slightly freaking out...I know that I'd ridden a scooter before, but not a motorbike, and we might have s.t.r.e.t.c.h.e.d. the truth a bit to our motorbike experience...

I couldn't even figure out how to turn it on.

Although I was a bit nervous at first, once we got out on the road, we were good to go! A bit timid at first whilst in town, especially when I was trying to navigate our way out of the city center to our destination, but eventually I got it figured out. 

As we were making our way out of town, we decided to Miyazaki a bit as well. I knew that we were trying to make our way to this one Pagoda on the outskirts of town, but what we came across was so much cooler. We found this giant guy ^.^   There were cows just grazing right by his feet. He was awesome.

Then we hit the jackpot! We found this sweet lying down Buddha that I made Kelly imitate.

The ponchos are hot, right?

It had started to rain, and luckily our Momma had packed each us a poncho in our stocking stuffers. (Put them to good use Mom! =]  ) 

I don't really know about Kelly, but I was feeling like a superhero in my poncho. With the speed of the motorbikes and the wind, the poncho magically transformed into a cape of superhero proportion. 

On to the real destination (though I would say in full cliché form, it was more about the journey bahaha): 

The graves of these Emperors from the 19th and 20th century.

 These things were PALACES! We only paid to go inside of one (the tickets were steep man, 60,000D each (aka $3). I don't know what these guys were planning to do once they were dead, but they had hunting grounds, fishing grounds, places for people to stay who came to visit them...It was insane! Kelly was saying she would go hang out there if she was the Emperor before she'd die. I would too. hahaha.

I swear, palaces! 

There was all this religious meaning to crossing over these different houses and passing into different sections of the afterlife and crossing over bridges and lakes, but since we didn't take a guide (muahah) we didn't really understand that, but it was lovely to just wander and Miyazaki. 

The final gate in this picture leads to this forest-y area that is enclosed by a giant wall, that's the final resting place of the Emperor. Now there were about...7 or so of these big grave areas spread throughout the surrounding countryside of Hue. We drove by most of them, wandered around one that was under restoration, and explored this guy's fully! 

Hark!

I peed right next to this ruin. I feel kind of bad, but it was a Leaning Tower of Pisa kind of moment. 

Kelly and I spent the full day out on our motorbikes. It was probably one of my favorite days in Vietnam. It was nice to get out in the countryside and have the freedom of going wherever we wanted. We drove by beautiful rivers, wound around sharp turns in villages, and honked our way through the city (well Kelly was the real honker, I couldn't find my horn button...hahah). 

Eventually, we made our way back to Hue and while we had tamed two beasts, two others were down right barbaric. We had tried to find food for lunch, but we were just too far out and couldn't find anything, so literally as soon as we got back to our hostel we set out for a night of restaurant hopping and scarfing and ended the day with a bang.