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Published: August 18th 2006
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See this happening in London ?
We've seen loads of these in Việt Nam. This was the fist time the camera was handy. A lady pushes her talking scales around while they blare some ear-splitting slogans in Vietnamese ("Giu Tu Phat" perhaps ?). You stand on the scales, hand over your 2,000 dong and the machine weighs and measures you - your stats are presented to you on a paper slip. Hurrah ! We have come to the last long-distance bus journey in Việt Nam - the four-hour drive from Hội An to Huế. We have found the bus system here to be quite well-organised, but it puts you in contact with nothing but other travellers and does not give the opportunity to meet any Vietnamese people. Ultimately though, given Việt Nam's appalling driving conditions, these buses represent the safest way of getting around the country.
We leave Hội An on the same day as our visit to Mỹ Sơn, which had us up at 5am to see the ruins before it got too hot (which it does by about 9 or 10am here). After a quick lunch we hop on our bus, a decidedly rickety old thing compared to the sparkling aircon juggernauts we've been taking so far, and head to Huế. Well, not quite. As always on a bus which transports only foreigners, the bus circles the narrow streets of outer Hội An for the best part of an hour while we pick up passenger after passenger. With many people travelling alone or simply in pairs, it takes quite some time to fill up the whole bus. And a
Still some way to go...
We thought this road sign looked amusing, especially since it was plonked in downtown Huế. Luckily, as for those final 653km, we'll be doing them at thirty thousand feet ! Vietnamese driver will
never, and I mean
never set off for his destination unless his vehicle is fully (that means people in the aisles on little plastic chairs) loaded.
We finally chug out of Hội An back toward Route 1, the main route which connects Sài Gòn with Hà Nội. En route we pass through Đa Nẵng, Việt Nam's third largest city, and through some breathtaking scenery. This part of the Vietnamese coast is hemmed in very closely against the sea by Việt Nam's mountainous spine, and the drive takes over high passes and through an unsettlingly long road tunnel blasted straight through the hillside. We pull into central Huế in the early afternoon, thankfully quite near the main cluster of small hotels (conveniently for the traveller, hotels here tend to be found in clumps) - today for some reason we're not up to the usual hassle of finding a motorbike or taxi to the hotel, so we walk !
Huế was the political capital of Việt Nam from 1802 until 1945 under the Nguyễn Dynasty. It has long been Việt Nam's foremost religious, cultural and educational centres. The city's principal attractions include a large number of opulent
One big flag !
"Just in case you hadn't noticed, you are in Việt Nam". A casual reminder of who's boss...that flag's the size of a house ! tombs built by the Nguyễn emperors for themselves, as well as a huge, walled Citadel bang in the centre of town. The Citadel itself encloses, Russian doll style, the Imperial Enclosure which in turn encircles the Forbidden Purple City. This was the Emperor's private palace, accessible only to him, his concubines and the odd eunuch. We set off the following day to visit the Citadel, under blue skies and a very very hot sun. Unfortunately Alex had caught the cold I had managed to shrug off in Mũi Né, so with the heat it was not a particularly comfortable day ! The Citadel is located across the Perfume River (
Sông Hương, a romantic name for quite an ordinary river...) from the bulk of the modern new town. Crossing the bridge, the high walls of the Citadel loom overhead, dominated by a positively gargantuan flag tower, atop which flutters - you guessed it - a giant yellow star against a red background. I guess imperial palaces and concubines don't fit in very well with the Communist ideal, so Hà Nội felt it necessary to discreetly remind everybody (for miles around) that the days of imperial debauchery are well and truly over.
Ngõ Mon Gate
The stunning main gate into the Imperial Enclosure. If only there were more buildings like this one left in the Citadel... Killjoys !
The entrance to the Imperial Enclosure is dominated by the stunning
Ngo Mon or Phoenix Gate. If the beautiful architecture of the gate is anything to go by, the Forbidden Purple City promises to be an amazing sight. Sadly, though, the Phoenix Gate is but a tantalising glimpse of what the Nguyễn Dynasty's Palace
used to look like. Indeed, the vast bulk of the halls, palaces and pavilions the Emperors lived and enjoyed themselves in has now disappeared. The Forbidden Purple City is not much more than a large flat expanse of yellowing grass. Apparently a large fire in the 1940s destroyed much of the City. The rest of it was finished off during the Việt Nam War. Its such a sleepy town that's it hard to guess now, but in the 1960s Hue was the site of some of the war's most savage fighting - the city is located more or less centrally along Việt Nam's north-south axis...The
Tết Offensive of 1968 thus saw off most of the City's opulent buildings. What is left has been well preserved, but there's no denying that most visitors to Huế find this something of a disappointment. I would tend
Squirm squirm
The lotus ponds just inside the main gate are filled with a great mass of writhing koi carp. Feeding them is quite a lot of fun - they actually haul themselves out of the water over each other to get to the food ! to agree...
The following day we hopped onto a couple of
xe ôm to visit some further sights around the south of Huế. These included to tomb of one of the Nguyễn emperors,
Tự Đức. His tomb, a rather nondescript stone structure, is surrounded by acres of pine and frangipani trees, ponds covered in lotus flowers, and various elegant wooden pavilions and palaces. Indeed, to
Tự Đức it would have been a waste to only enjoy this place after death - he spent a large portion of his later years here, surrounded by nature (to say nothing of his concubines...). Later we drove to
Thiên Mụ Pagoda, and, deep in the countryside to the east of Huế, a stunning covered footbridge plonked in the middle of some rice paddies. The ride was extremely bucolic and, like all journeys in Việt Nam (those on foot included), rather hair-raising. It was certainly worth it though and we had an enjoyable day after the anticlimax of the Citadel !
You can definitely feel the "faded grandeur" ethos that all the guidebooks harp on about - it certainly feels like Hue could have been the beating heart of Việt Nam, but, like
Emperor's Reading Room
This library is one of the few buildings left standing in the Forbidden Purple City. The interior has been left to crumble...neglect or a point being made by the Party about imperial decandence ?... the Emperors themselves, Huế has fizzled out a bit. We might have enjoyed the quiet calm here a bit more if we'd known
quite what Ha Noi would be like...
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