The Purple City...Where is it?

Trip Start Dec 01, 1999

103

Trip End Aug 31, 2000

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Flag of Vietnam Hue, Vietnam
Thursday, December 30, 1999

Purple City (8)

Purple City (5)

Purple City (1)

Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya

Hue, once the capital of Vietnam was a city that I only spent one night and one day in.

Usually within the first couple of hours walking around most people can tell if they would like to stay longer. For some reason Hue just didn't grab me by the goalies at all. It didn't blow my hair back or even blow my whistle. A lot of people I met loved it. When I head back to Vietnam I'll drop in and try to find out why. Anyhow, we had two choices for the day, either a boat trip along the Perfume River or to spend several hours walking about the Purple City.

I don't know why we chose the Purple City.

The write up sounded interesting and if we were told that 90% of it actually didn't exist we would have chosen the boat trip. I actually thought it was going to be something like China's Forbidden City but when we arrived we found only several buildings and a hell of a lot of grass and signs stating that 'on this site was this thingamabob'. We knew it had been bombed and a lot of it destroyed but had no idea to the extent or that bugger all had been rebuilt. We ended up spending many hours there walking around, talking and relaxing.

There was still a lot of interesting things to see and some of the buildings that were left were very beautiful.

By late afternoon we had to return to the hotel as my friend had become rather ill. There was an English speaking doctor there and after a look over he gave her some pills. We were all surprised that he didn't give her a jar of Tiger Balm and send her away.

'Hey it's Tiger Balm.
What did you say?
Your mother just died!
Oh no!
Here, put this here tiger Balm on her and she'll be right in no time!

The Vietnamese love, absaFREAKINlutely, LOVE their Tiger Balm. It fixes everything from amputated limbs to flat tyers. Well, not to that extent but everything in between. You get the drift. Back to the pills, they worked and all was well again.

There actually is a lot around Hue to see.

The main two places I wanted to head to were the Bach Ma National Park which has within another French hill station and I also wanted to head to the Vinh Moc Tunnels. It would have been cool to compare them to the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Vinh Moc Tunnels are still as they were and have not been widened for tourism.

The day ended and the sun headed elsewhere. We headed for another sew circle dinner and then made our way to the train station for our overnight journey to Hanoi.

Beers N Cheers toya...shane