DMZ and dragon boats in Hue
Trip Start
May 12, 2005
1
11
33
Trip End
Sep 11, 2005
Hue,
Vietnam
Monday, June 6, 2005
The journey there was stunning - only four hours, but gorgeous views of the South China Sea, golden beaches and dramatic mountains.
The city itself was ok - it used to be the country's capital and has a walled 'old city', which is, bizarrely, half-devoted to agriculture nowadays, as it suffered so much bombing in the 'American' war.
The imperial palace - or what was left of it - was fantastic. I took a guided tour to find out as much as I could about the history of Vietnam's 13 emperors, their wives and concubines and the different areas of the palace set out specifically for each. One of the emperors only had ten, rather than the usual hundreds of concubines, leading my guide to infer that he "didn't like ladies".
The last emperor was brought up in Paris, spoke French, had just the one wife and was quite a trend-setter in Vietnam. Unfortunately he was the 13th emperor, aged 13 when he came to power, and only ruled for 13 years, before he was ousted from power. And 13's not even a particularly unlucky number here!
The thing that made Hue the most tiring (and tiresome) place I'd been so far, was disappointingly one of the things I'd been looking forward to the most: the tour of the DMZ (de-militarized zone).
Twelve hours on a bus sounded quite a long time when I booked it, but there were a coach-full of us, 12 items on the itinerary, and an English-speaking guide to accompany us all day.
I arrived at the bus at 6am to find that Aaron, the Australian guy, and another Aussie I'd met the night before - Steve - were booked onto the same trip and being the last ones to get onto the bus, we were sitting right at the back.
It was terrible. We spent practically all day on the bus and only stopped six times - two of which were for breakfast and lunch!
It was quite interesting to start with. There were bomb craters - now being farmed - at the side of the roads and the crops were definitely looking a lot less lush than further south: a legacy of the thousands of litres of Agent Orange and other defoliants dropped by the US. We even spotted a rusting tank at the side of the road.
The Vinh Moc tunnels, just north of the Ben Hai river and 17th parallel (the dividing line between North and South Vietnam), where whole villages of people lived during the war were definitely worth seeing, partly for the contrast with the fighting tunnels I'd seen at Cu Chi. And our final stop - at a very small museum at Khe Sanh (site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war) - was quite interesting, but not worth a nine-hour trip to see it.
Our other stop, at an ethnic minority village, was just pointless. We weren't shown round, were told nothing about the village or the tribe and just had kids clustering round us, asking us to take their photos - for which they demanded payment.
Perhaps if we had been able to understand our guide's English (or even hear him properly from the back of the bus) it would have been bearable. He was supposed to be talking us through the sites we were seeing from the coach, but couldn't really speak English well enough to get the information across. The commentary (from our seats at the back of the coach) consisted of "mumble mumble mumble mumble radio station - you know, radio station?" "mumble mumble mumble mumble bridge - you know, bridge?".
After a while we gave up, nodded and gave weary smiles to the guide - and just talked among ourselves for 12 hours on the back seat of the bus, feeling a bit like naughty schoolkids.
So, my knowledge of the DMZ (and that of the other people in at least the last four rows of the bus!) is firmly based on the information in my Lonely Planet guide and the things we think we spotted from the window...
Everyone arrived back in Hue looking thoroughly shattered and Aaron and I went out for a couple of very necessary beers that night.
Had I not already booked a river trip to see the Emperors' tombs the next day, I think I would have left Hue straight away, but as I'd already paid for the trip, I went. It was an incredibly hot day and I was fed up tours, so I 'let myself off' seeing a couple of the tombs and only went to the ones that the guidebook recommended most strongly and stayed on the boat for the rest of them.
I was glad I went to the last site, Ming Mang's tomb, which was the furthest away from Hue. There were hardly any people there and it was very beautiful and peaceful: just what I needed.
Cathy
