Today was a very lazy day. We started by eating breakfast at the hotel. We had eggs and a baguette as well as a coffee, although the coffee was certainly not in our top 5.
After breakfast we went out to do some local sightseeing. There are a lot of local tombs around the town which are supposedly worth seeing. We left the house to see the tomb of the King Thieu Tri in the morning. It turned out to be a wast of our time. The tomb was off the main road, behind a school. It was being guarded by a few cows and a barking dog. It had a few stone figures in front of it, but the tomb itself was badly maintained.
We spent the rest of the morning doing something we’ll post about when leaving Vietnam. Since it was already becoming very hot, we went back to the hotel where we spent most of our afternoon.
We left the hotel again in the later afternoon to visit the Tomb of Khai Dinh. This tomb was a lot nicer. The stairs up to the tomb were very impressive and decorated with beautiful statues. On the top we entered the actual tomb. It is a about 4-5 meters high with beautiful paintings on the ceiling. The grave itself was decorated with ceramics and lots of gold and featured a copper statue of the emperor.
After leaving the tomb we were surprised by rain. The first rain since we arrived and we both left our rain clothes at at the hotel. We quickly decided to go take a seat at a nearby street restaurant to wait until the rain is over. The food - some kind of soup with quail eggs and rice noodles - was delicious as always. In Vietnamese: “ngon”, which means delicious or tasty.
We drove back to the hotel driving through some minor rain. After arriving at the hotel we met with two of the Finns again and decided to eat something on the rooftop bar with them. It was a nice evening with lots of beer and food. Kippis (Finnish for Cheers)!
Tomorrow we’ll try to get up early to hit the road west and then north. We’ll have around 4-5 hours of driving ahead of us.
