***Written at 8:30am***
I'm sitting on the "tour bus" now after a hectic morning that started with the first alarm at 5:30, then another at 5:38, then another at 5:45. I woke up, packed up, and went to check my e-mail while I was waiting for James and Meg.
One (of the many) things that I picked up from my ALE days is the ability to go from a full dead sleep to fully packed and ready to go in no time at all. After some e-mailing and twittering I had some Vietnamese coffee. I'm not sure if I explained how this was made already, but they make it in a glass (not a mug) with a small tin filter on the top. They add some fine ground coffee and then hot water, it drips into the glass that has a bottom of thick sweet condensed milk. Just as we were sitting down a man came to bring us back to Dong Ha to catch the bus. So we chugged and ran.
We picked up some other tourists bound for the DMZ at a hotel and set off out of Hue at 7am, which didn't seem like enough time to make it before 8am. After some nail biting and reassurance from the driver that it was only "2 minutes away" we made a phone call and found that the bus leaves at 8:30 instead of 8. We picked up some supplies, bread and jam and coffee for the road.
The manager called us a taxi to the bus station, we loaded up and she followed us to the station on a motorbike. She paid the fare and made sure we were set before leaving us. She was such a great help in making all of our plans happen.
The bus took off at 10 til 9, I'm writing now 15 minutes after departure with about 10 other people on the bus, we'll probably pick up a few more along the way. Alright, we'll see how things are in 4 hours...
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