Cafe on Thu Wheels

This place has become our second home: it's just opposite our hotel and Thu, the owner, is completely mad but extremely friendly and funny (she keeps talking about bananas and coconuts!). Plus, beer is only 7000 dong (about 30p).

They run a motorbike tour which took us around Hue and its various historic sites which was fantastic. The guide knew all the best times to be at the different places so we avoided all the tour groups going around the pagodas and saw the monks come out to sing in their temple, as well as stand on a french bunker, looking across the Perfume River at Hamburger Hill which is still inaccessible due to the unexploded ordnance there.

One pagoda was the home of a monk who, in 1963, drove in an Austin to Saigon to protest against the Buddhist persecution of General Diem, the leader of southern Vietnam at the time. He poured petrol over himself and then set fire to his body. The photos on the walls at Hue are gruesome but the tales say that although his flesh was burnt, his heart was untouched.

The weather is finally meant to start improving tomorrow...it's been cold and drizzly for days.