A purple hue
Trip Start
Jan 20, 2009
1
56
65
Trip End
Jun 2009
Huế,
Thừa Thiên-Huế,
Vietnam
Monday, June 1, 2009
I woke up in serious pain, not just from the red wine but it would appear that even though it's easy to walk downhill, you're still putting quite a lot of strain on your calf muscles! To make things even better I was on the 4th floor of my hotel - lovely views, killer stairs. Hue is the ancient capital of Vietnam, someone decided to abandon Hanoi for about 100 years, thinking things would be nicer (and not to mention safer, a little bit further south). Therefore there's a host of historically important tombs, pagodas & palaces all of which are on the Lonely Planet must-see list & therefore well, you must see them. I've got to admit though that my enthusiasm for site-seeing was pretty much at rock bottom. I was seriously exhausted, could barely walk & must have been slightly hungover.
Luckily, I found some nice ladies in the internet cafe next door that basically told me what to do & in exchange for a bus ticket & booking a tour for the following day, they hired a bicycle for me, told me where to go & what to see & were basically nice to me.
So after a lot of faffing around involving memory sticks and things, I set off on my bike. My crap bike which had hardly any air in the tyres and was approximately 30 years old. Every peddle stroke was seriously painful & beause of all the messing around, it was midday before I set off & I could feel the sun boring a hole in my head. Never the less, I peddled (argh, I can't spell that word) on to one of the most important pagodas in the country. It was nice. I stopped for a refreshing drink, basically coconut milk with lumps in which looks a bit like frogspawn but only costs 2,000 dong! I really thought I couldn't face the ride back to the city, let alone the 10km or so to the next site on my must-see list.
I got preyed on I'm afraid & a little lady with a very pretty dragon boat managed to persuade me to visit the tomb by river & then she'd take me back to the citadel. No sun, no cycling, just me and the bike sitting on the boat, cruising up the Perfume River with the wind in our hair (spokes). To cut a long story short, we misunderstood each other and the price we settled on I thought was for the whole trip & she thought was per hour. We had a bit of an argument & she sulked & then refused to let me off the boat. Eventually we split it 50/50 (I'd only been out 2 hours) but we parted company unhappy with each other & I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
I was also annoyed as I'd left the best for last, the ancient citadel closed at 5.30pm and cost 55,000dong to get in. By the time I got there it had gone 4.30pm & the Lonely Planet (them again) had said you could easily spend a whole day here. It all turned out well in the end though, I got the best of the light & wandered around uninformed and happily soaking up the atmosphere around the beautifully restored buildings as well as the ruins & even had time for an icecream before it closed. It was incredibly peaceful & despite my broken legs & weary brain it was a beautiful place to be as the day came to a close.
As I left, there were hundreds of children flying brightly coloured kites at the front of the citadel, there's not enough of this in my opinion. No doubt, it wouldn't work in the UK because health and safety would be scared of garrotings in Hyde Park but it's a shame, it's a really pretty sight. Another pretty sight was the sunset, again it's truly truly purple. I don't know what carcinogenic toxins are released into the environment around here to make such spectacular sunsets & I wouldn't want to hang around for too long to find out but whatever it is, it's been going on for centuries. Weird.
I dragged my weary bones (well actually I cycled them) back home and to bed. Packed the bag & arranged a wake up call for 5.30am. Excellent. Sorry that this isn't the most exciting entry but I'm afraid the fast pace had gotten to me a bit, what I really needed was a good rest. Unfortunately I'd booked a tour of the American War sites followed by a night bus north, hmm maybe in hindsight I could have planned that better.
