Worth a whole blog entry

(The first picture is one of the villages that we scooted through. A woman lost control of her scooter when a big truck came by and dropped it, along with all the goods that she was carrying. Geoff got off the scooter to help her with the VERY heavy bags ~ I'm pretty sure the whole village came to watch!)

We had an interesting day in Hue and I figured it deserved an entire post. We set out on motor bike in the early morning hoping we could be at this waterfall for some swimming by the middle of the day (the hottest time - and I'm talkin heat index of 114). Everything was going well with a few stops at an amazing pagoda and also an old arena where they had lions and elephants fight. We were on our way to check out the beach and waterfall when we pulled over so I could jump off and buy some water. I came out to see that Geoff had made a new friend. The Vietnamese guy fell in love with us and begged us to have lunch with him. We were nit hungry ( and also a bit weary of one of those scams that the book tries to freak you out with) so we asked if he'd mind just grabbing a quick drink. So the drink turned into him really wanting to take us to an old war bunker. We couldn't say no - hearing his stories of the war and his experiences really pulled at our hearts. So on we went. Well after we checked out the bunker we jumped on our bike and we had a major flat tire. We happened to figure it out right in front of a repair shop (I'm using that word lightly). Coincidence? You decide. So they fixed our tire and off we went. We parted ways with our sweet new friend, feeling bad for ever questioning his motives. We got to the beach and decided to have some lunch at this little beach side cafe. Of course we had a ton of kids trying to sell us things but we had a certain draw to this sweet 16 year old girl. We bought her a coke and we chatted for a long time. After our chat and lunch we jumped back on our scooter to head to the falls. Oops.... Tire was flat, again. Our new friend fad her friend take us to the nearest "repair shop". We decided that it would not be a great idea to keep riding so we asked some lady if we could use her phone to call the hotel where we got the scooter. The hotel said they would send someone with a new bike. Great. So we waited, and called back, and waited, and called back. Finally someone showed up to look at the bike but on the way to see us they got in a bad scooter accident and we're all cut up and bleeding and also not happy with us. So we decided to just move on and hope for the best, since our help was really no help at this point. We made our way through beautiful hills and villages. We started to realize that it was getting late and we would not have time for the falls, so we started heading back to town which was about 45 km away when, oops, the tire went out. So at this point we had to get help. We had stoppped in front of a house and they let us use their phone. It took about 1 hr of phone calls to work everything out and at the end they told us to hitch hike back to town. Ahhhh. Okay.... So, we did just that. Ended up getting in the air conditioned cat (heaven) of some nice young men who gave us front door service to the hotel.
So it was a challenging day but also one of the best because we were able to meet some lovely locals and our faith in humanity was uplifted. There are some great people in this world (except for the scooter guy, he was a jerk!).