Day 23 - Hue

  Hue, Vietnam
Tuesday, September 25, 2007

We were collected by the tour bus, early for once, and off we set for our day's journey around the UNESCO 'world heritage city'.

Our first stop was the 'citadel', a very impressive old city complex, which probably sounds much older than it is.

From what we could understand of the tour guide (lovely guy, dodgy English), the citadel was built in the early 1800s and completed about 40 years later.



The citadel was the most protected area of the city, where the Emporer of Vietnam resided and where all official business was conducted. At the heart of the citadel was the 'Forbidden City', where only the Royal family themselves and a few trusted eunuchs & concubines were allowed inside.

From what the guide said, it sounds like a number of eminent representatives of Vietnam travelled overseas in the 19th century, saw leading cities like Beijing in all its glory and thought "I'm sure that OUR Emporer would like a bit of that", and so it proved.

Sadly most of the oldest and most important buildings were destroyed during the war with America in the 60s, in fact you can still see where bulletholes have peppered some of the existing buildings and ornaments. It seems that the Viet Cong pushed south of the de-militarised zone (DMZ) and the Americans were keen to push them backwards, which they did very successfully in this case.

In fact any of you that are film buffs may remember that Stanley Kubrick set the 2nd half of his Vietnam war epic 'Full Metal Jacket' in Hue City, with the Viet Cong launching an audacious surprise attack on the American base during 'Tet', a traditional Vietnamese festival where they remember dead relatives.

Our guide said that in this famous battle the Viet Cong were no match for the modern war machines of the Americans, which is why nearly all of the Vietnamese success resulted from guerilla action in the jungles, where the larger, more modern equipment was of very limited use.

As soon as the Viet Cong found themselves exposed in city spaces like the Hue citadel, they were bombed and machine-gunned into submission, at the cost of some beautiful old buildings steeped in history, it's a real shame.

Thankfully there were still some lovely buildings inside the citadel walls, even if they will need an absolute fortune to restore the place to its former glory.

The mini replica they showed us of how the Citadel area used to look was INCREDIBLE. Hopefully the Vietnamese governmentt will be able to do to the Hue citadel what the Croatians were able to do to within the old city walls of Dubrovnik, because it will be even more impressive.

After a good walk around and plenty of interesting info we got back in the bus and headed for some 'garden houses', which sounded thoroughly boring. These small houses were where the powerful mandarins (who controlled territories & forces on behalf of the Emporer) used to relax after their long and stressful days.

All sorts of exotic fruit grew in these gardens, mangoes, bananas, pineapples, star fruit, dragon fruit... if only we could grow fruits like that in our garden in Islington!

Next we were taken to a village where they made incense sticks and conical bamboo hats, which all the working class people seem to wear over here.

The idea behind the conical hats is that they keep the rain off in rainy season, and the sun off in dry season, but they're not particularly flattering!

Katie was lucky enough to be chosen as the model for the group, perhaps a new career beckons? 'Katie Moss?!'



But if you thought THAT was bad, check out these 'sock-gloves' sported by one of the Asian tourists in our group! Niiiiiiice....



The young girl who made the incense sticks each day is apparently paid 40,000 Dong a day (about GBP 1.20 or $2.50), and she makes thousands of them. I've never thought how they were made, but it's quite interesting. There's definitely a technique, which she naturally has down to a fine art.

After convincing Katie that no we didn't need any lairy paintings thank you very much, off we went to the Tu Duc tomb, which was situated in some really beautiful surroundings.

Before the communists dissolved the royal family in the mid-60s, and made them 'commoners' (can you imagine this happening in Britain?!), it seemed that all the Emporers were locked in successive battles of ego to out-do each other with the scale and design of their burial places.  

They spent fortunes of their country's money to build these monumental tomb complexes, employing thousands of workers and taking up to 15 years to complete each one. One of the Emporers even levied an extra tax on his people in order to pay for his grand tomb!

The Tu Duc tomb was really quite something. You entered through massive gates, walked past a beautiful curved pond of lotus flowers (the national symbol), past the summer house where the Emporer would sit and compose poems and read (tough life!), before walking up loads of steps and through ever grander buildings until you reached the building containing his tomb.



There were some great views, and the buildings were full of interest, I just wished I could understand more than 60% of what our guide was saying.

For example, he pronounced "worship" as "gossip", which had Katie & I screwing our faces up in complete confusion... We were like "why would the King encourage everyone to gossip about him?!"

Finally we worked out what he meant, but I think it continued to put Katie's teeth on edge throughout the day! Bless him though, he seemed a sweet guy, unlike the rip-off merchants in the north of the country.

This 'tomb' was actually finished before King Tu Duc died, so he was able to use his 'burial site' for 16 years before he died! I don't blame him, it was stunning.

We then went to a local restaurant for lunch, which was very average, and then set off to the Khai Dinh tomb. This one was right at the top of a hill, so you had to climb about 200 big steps to get to the top.

This was also the only tomb where the emporer chose to bury his remains under a statue of himself, obviously painted in gold and all manner of other decoration, it was very impressive.



This was the emporer that forced his citizns to pay more tax to pay for his resting place, and you could see why this was necessary, it was amazing. The view back over the valley was also breathtaking.

Our last tomb was also very special, it was called the Minh Mang tomb. It was quite a way out of town, but well worth it. 

Emporer Minh Mang had the idea that his tomb should be at the highest point of the complex, and that visitors should have to keep moving upwards to get to his 'level'... and you thought that Simon Cowell had a big ego!

He also decided to build his tomb in an extremely warm location, so apparently 3,000 of the 10,000 workers died of heat exhaustion before it was finished, which was nice.

He requested two man-made lakes to be created either side of the temples, to cool the area down, so they had to drain rainwater off the mountains to create them! This would be hard enough to do today, let alone 200 years ago!

To get to his resting place, you had to walk up steps, through buildings, up more steps etc etc until we reached the foot of the mountain, and his tomb. It was surrounded by water and trees as you can see below, so it was also very impressive.



I remember that this Emporer had something like 40 concubines and 143 children! These guys certainly had it tough ;)

The last stop was a nice 7 tier pagoda and temple complex, definitely one of the best we've seen so far. 80% of Vietnamese are Buddhists, so pagodas tend to be seen everywhere, but they're not usually this grand.



By the side of this temple they stored the car that a famous Buddhist monk (who worshipped at this temple) drove into the middle of Saigon in 1964.

When he arrived at his destination, the monk got out the car, calmly poured petrol all over himself, began to meditate, and then set fire to himself. As you do.

The resulting pictures helped turn the American public against what was happening in Vietnam, and the image became extremely famous, one of the most powerful photos of all time.

Music fans like myself will recognise that photo from the cover of Rage Against The Machine's first CD.

Here's that famous picture, with the old blue Austin car in the background...



The last part of our day tour was a 'dragon boat ride' which involved a 30 minute journey back into town along the "beautiful Perfume River".

Hmmmm....

The 'dragon boat' turned out to be something that can best be described as a floating wooden dancefloor with plastic garden furniture, and the Perfume River was not exactly what you would call "beautiful", unless you lived in Hull and had never seen a river before.

Still, it was a nice (slow) route back into town along the river, past the citadel to our left. At the end of the boat ride rather unceremoniously dumped by the riverside, with no sign of any transport back into town! Cheers. It wasn't too far, so we managed to navigate our way home without any problems.

After chilling in the room for twenty minutes, we walked across town to have dinner in a veggie place which the guide book recommended. When we arrived we were put off by the dirty plastic chairs outside, so instead we had a nice meal in a restaurant with a lovely front garden full of trees in full bloom. It was also full of westerners, but the food was really good.

I talked Katie into a couple of drinks in a bar on the way home, which had a free pool table. Anyone that knows me well will know that I fancy myself as a bit of a pool legend so it was great to be able to play all night and not mess around with needing to pay!

They also had free internet, so when Katie got bored of playing pool she caught up on some emails while I continued to play by myself. (insert your own joke here)

Not sure if I mentioned it last night but this week is a special week for kids across Asia & the Buddhist world.

Over here adults give kids 'moon cakes', which are soft fluffy cakes which are packaged in extraordinary ornate boxes, mainly red and gold. I remember in Japan the decoration is often more important than the present themselves, and it must be similar here, the boxes look incredible but the cakes themselves are nothing special.

The kids take to the streets in the evenings, making a right racket, banging drums, blowing whistles, dancing as/with Chinese dragons; they bring streets to a complete standstill as people stop to watch and give them money for good luck.

Some of the kids are REALLY cute, maybe only 5 or 6 yrs old, and smiling their little heads off, bless them.

We'd been in the bar about 30 minutes when it started to absolutely BUCKET down outside, with really strong monsoon rains. The poor kids outside and those adults watching got soaked, so suddenly our bar got packed with customers!

When the rains stopped the kids also decided to invade the bar, so at one point I was trying to play pool with 2 Chinese dragons dancing around the table! I bet Ronnie O'Sullivan doesn't have to put up with that ;)

Ok, we have to get up early tomorrow for our bus to the attractive trading town of Hoi An, and I'm setting my alarm for 2am to hopefully watch one of the English cup games on tonight, which I'm praying will be Liverpool v Reading... Should get a couple of hours sleep before getting on the bus, which I think is a 5 hour journey.

A song just popped into my head which seems appropriate to our non-stop travelling, so 10 bonus points to the first person to identify the children's tv show from it's theme tune, all together now:

"Maybe tomorrow, we'll wanna settle down,
Until tomorrow, we'll just keep movin on...
Every step we take, we're making new friends,
Can't stay for long, just turn around, and we're gone again."

Anyone?!


Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx