Hue
Arriving in Hue was a great feeling, as we had probably overstayed in Hanoi by a day or two (mainly because we thought our Cambodian visas would take longer to process when we booked our train tickets), but now we were moving on and had a new town to explore.Our first impressions of Hue were very favourable; it was clean, friendly and crossing the road was no longer a suicide mission. Even the cyclo men and the salespeople (if you can call them that) have a certain charm: For example, rather than just shouting 'Oi' or 'halo' at you, they ask how you are, where you're from and where you're going. Admittedly they're still trying to make money off you, but it is at least done in a more friendly way. My faith in the friendliness of the Vietnamese has been restored!
With our enthusiasm rediscovered, we managed to walk around most of the town on our first day. Initiailly we headed slightly out of the town to see the cathedral that visible from the window of our hotel room. After lunch at a popular traveller's cafe we then tackled the citadel area of the town.
We started with the main tourist attraction, the Imperial Enclosure. Our guide describes this as "a surreal world of deserted gardens and ceremonial halls". We have both grown a little tired of temples so we were pleasantly surprised by the Imperial Enclosure. Unlike in previous temples there were considerably less tourists and indeed much of it was still in ruins, partly because of past neglect and partly because of the damage from the Vietnam (or 'American' as they call it over here) War.
We spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering through the rest of the Citadel. This mostly residential area is made up of narrow winding streets and agricultural wetland areas. As in Hanoi the people seemed to live their lives in the street, but they were so much friendlier here. That said, we did have one nasty experience when a young girl basically forced me to take a photo of her doing a completely false smile. She then demanded money off us so we gave her 200 dong (about 1p, we thought she could buy herself a penny sweet). Not happy with this, she then followed us for about 20 minutes, sticking out her hand whenever we looked at her. Eventually she realised we were taking a firm stand and left us alone. We had learnt our lesson about taking pictures of people who ask for it.
After supper we went for a wander through the town and bumped into Lindsay, the American from the train, and she very kindly bought us a beer.
For our second day we had organized a boat trip on the Perfume River to visit the Tombs of the Nguyen Dynasty. We had booked this through our wonderfully helpful hotel. We waited in the reception, expecting some form of minibus to pick us up, so imagine our surprise when we were directed onto the back of a couple of mopeds!! It was only a short trip to the river boats but it was great fun, weaving around traffic and pedestrians.
We boarded one of the dragon boats that we had seen travelling up and down the river. In the spirit of our previous trips, however, our first boat was either broken or not busy enough to make the trip worthwhile, so we had to jump across to a second, more overdcrowded dragon boat in the middle of the river. The boat was fun, if a little noisy and wet (due to several 20 minute torrential downpours). It was crewed by a family of 5 who seemed to live onboard. They each had their own jobs, and it was the mother's job to try and sell us all of sorts of souveneirs (or crap) from whistles to silk nighties.
Our first stop was the Thien Mu Pagoda, which is famous for being the home of Thich Quang Duc, a monk who publicly burned himself to death in 1963 in protest at the policies of the President of South Vietnam.
The next stop was the Tomb of Tu Duc, which was less of a tomb, and more of a temple complex. This is positioned 2km from the river side so we had to get a motorbike from the boat. This was much scarier than our first ride because half of the journey was along a dirt path which was not in the best condition after the rain.
We had lunch onboard the dragon boat - quite a feat to prepare, cook and serve food to 15 people on such a small boat. Our lunch was supposed to be inclusive and we refused to pay for extras as many of the other passengers did. This meant that we were served with rice, green beans and tofu. Imagine our delight when the rest of the passengers started passing us their leftovers!!
With the rain over and the blistering sun back, our final stop was the Tomb of Minh Mang. This had some great architecture in an even more beautiful setting. After this the boat slowly motored its way the 16KM back to town, where we enjoyed another dirt-cheap Vietnamese meal.
We had one last morning in Hue before getting the bus to Hoi An and decided to hire a couple of bicycles (our trusted Lonely Planet book suggests doing this in most of the places we have been, but up until this point there has been no chance of us risking our lives on Asian roads!). We cycled slowly out of town to Thanh Toan Bridge, a covered footbridge 7km east of Hue. The journey was very enjoyable, taking us through expansive rice paddies, several rural villages, and flooded roads. When we arrived at the bridge we were slightly disappointed to see a group of Australian tourists who had reached it by hiring a squadron of motorcyclists with matching hats. We did, however, find great amusement in watching them have their palms read by an 80 year old Vietnamese woman who, without exception, predicted that each of them would have only one husband/wife and be "very happy". That was 10,000 dong down the drain!!
Satisfied with our adventure into the Vietnamese countryside we returned to the hotel with two very acute cases of "saddle-bum", and waited for our open-tour bus to Hoi An. Hue was a place where everything seemed to go brilliantly, but it was only small so we were happy to move on. We are very grateful to the travel agent who convinced us to come here, even if he was only doing it so that we'd buy his open-bus ticket.
As with every other minibus driver in Vietnam, ours made sure that the bus was more than full before leaving. As a result it was not the most comfortable of rides, but the journey was particularly scenic and the driver showed less suicidal tendencies than usual. It was also very short by our recent standards, taking just over 3 hours.
Chris
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