Day 3 - Riding from Hue to Khe Sanh by motorcycle

When we woke up at 7am this morning, it was already 33 degrees 🥵. Our day started with a typical Vietnamese breakfast - soup. The place we went to is famous among the locals for its soup. Dung, our guide, told us that people come for breakfast as early as 6:30am and then go to work, school, or university. It was exciting to watch the locals eat because, of course, they eat soup with chopsticks 😁. While we struggled not to spill anything, even the little ones mastered it. The noodles, meat, and herbs are eaten with chopsticks, and then the broth is slurped directly from the bowl. Vietnamese food culture is sooo different from ours. Leftovers, like bones, are simply thrown on the floor. It is then swept up by the waiters and the next guest can take their place. Even slurping is perfectly normal.

After breakfast, we went to a cafe across the street to have coffee. Unfortunately, we already felt that something was not right. We had stomachaches and just didn't feel well. Nevertheless, we got on the motorcycle and off we went - after all, we didn't have any other choice 🙃. We had 145 km ahead of us.

The first stop was a famous temple. Since we had already seen it five years ago, we were soon on our way again. Of course, the temperatures had risen in the meantime and all three of us were struggling with the heat.

The road led us along the highway to a citadel from the time of the French colonies. After the fierce battles during the Vietnam War that took place there, it is now a memorial site. We also visited this.

Since we still didn't feel any better afterwards, we went to a pharmacy. Dung took care of the communication. We got medicine for our symptoms and off we went 😅.

By now, the temperatures had risen to 40 degrees. With long clothes and the buff pulled up over our noses, we were well protected from the sun, but the temperatures and the sun rays were almost unbearable. The UV exposure was 12, so taking off the long clothes was not an option 🫨. Sweating vs. sunburn.

We took breaks every 30 minutes to drink enough. Since it is currently the dry season in Vietnam, high temperatures are actually not unusual, but the 40 degrees even surprised Dung, because it doesn't normally get that hot. As Dung and Chris were running out of energy by 12:30pm and Madlin was pretty exhausted from the heat and stomachaches, we made the decision not to make any more stops to visit something. We didn't take this decision lightly because we always experience so many interesting things with Dung, but it just didn't make sense. We had to admit to ourselves that it was sensible to drive directly to the hotel and that's what we did. So we were already at the hotel at 2:40pm. Since the medicine from the pharmacy had shown little effect so far, we spent the rest of the day in bed with a hot water bottle.

Chris is feeling a bit better now and he had dinner with Dung. Madlin stayed in bed with the hot water bottle. At her own request, Chris brought her dry rice and on Dung's advice, she independently turned it into fries - teamwork 😉!

To make matters worse, we also had to change rooms because the air conditioning wasn't working and it would turn off on its own every 25 minutes 😒.

We hope we feel better tomorrow because we have 230 km ahead of us tomorrow.