Wall Graffiti in Hue, Vietnam

PICTURED: Buchela with the kid of one of the restaurant owners.


We spent our time in Hue, Vietnam in the backpacker part of town.

It was pleasant, interesting, and cheap.

Nothing captured the backpacker ally like the wall graffiti in the restaurants we frequented. I actually spent time reading them and trying, at the same time, to come to some sort of conclusion about the people who wrote them.

Our stay in a small, well equipped, clean and cheap hotel was comfortable. It was fun to observe young travelers even though we were the only ones with a child. In fact, it looked like we were actually the only ones married or in their mid thirties!

The music in these places was loud.

The customers were the type that ordered the cheapest possible thing on the menu so that they could have enough of their daily budget left to blow on beer.

We felt a bit old when we heard stories of roughing it out on shoe string budgets across Asia for months at a time... like the three British eighteen year olds (one boy, two girls - one a lover, the other a third wheel) who were on a 9 month trip.

There was a time when we would have traveled that way. We would have enjoyed it too. But our time has passed.

During our visit in Hue, while the young gleefully took 20 hour bus rides to their next destinations, we scrambled to book a plane ticket that cost three times as much because it was going to take only one hour.

Before we left however, we scribbled our own nonsense on the walls.

We may be getting old, but we are definitely not above all silliness.