Hue - Emperial Capital and Royal Tombs

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Day 6 Early departure from Hanoi Airport to Hue, Vietnam:

Before we depart for our next stop Hue, I must capture a couple anecdotes of naïve Julia and I getting ‘scammed’ at various times while in Hanoi (we did learn our lessons and didn’t have much of a problem the rest of the trip).

While in Hanoi Julia discovered she is a terrible haggler of street vendors. We’d seen 3-d pop up Thank You cards with envelopes being sold at every street corner in town. Julia was dead keen to get one, but was not 100% about approaching a vendor to negotiate the purchase of one. Finally, she got up the nerve and asked a ‘kind and generous’ old woman how much as was told the equivalent of one card for NZ$10; which Julia quickly produced and paid for a card. The woman seeing how eager Julia was offered her even more cards… fortunately she said ‘no’.. Standing back from a distance I watched this transpire and thought to myself ‘a sucker is born everyday’ J We debated whether this was in fact a good purchase and whether she could have paid less or gotten more cards had she negotiated. I suggest that I though she could have gotten at least three cards for that price. Needless to say over the next few days we saw vendors selling the same cards for much reduced price – I think the best bargain we saw was 10 to15 cards for the same price (i.e. less than a dollar a card). I’m proud of Julia as after this experience she got ‘somewhat better’ at asking what the “real price” was.

I on the other hand fell for a trick I not seen before. Some of you know my love of sending postcards from the places I visit – needless to say this requires finding a post office to purchase international stamps. Hanoi has a grad post office; and as I walking in off the hot and humid street into the relative cool of the post office I was immediately greeted by a professional looking person at the front door that asked if they could help me (foolish me clutching in my hand a stack of postcards must have looked like a lamb to the slaughter to this guy). I asked about international postage for the USA and UK and he said that yes he could help and to come over to this table set up in the post office lobby. He took the postcards from me counted them, walked away, returned with a roll of stamps, put the stamps on the postcards and then typed a figure onto a calculator to show me how much I owed. I was amazed to see the equivalent of NZ$15 – I’d never spent this much on postage anywhere else in the world, but thought it must just be Vietnam so I paid the guy. He then handed the postcards to a woman standing nearby, who then took me in one hand and the post cards in the other out to the street where she deposited them in the international mailbox. I thought this extremely strange, both because they wouldn’t let me look at the stamps and they had to take the postcards outside to post them. As I walked back to the hotel I started to get this dreadful sense that I’d somehow been scammed and the postcards would not make it to their destination…. Sure enough I learned at my next stop that I should have paid a total of NZ$2… fortunately the postcards did actually make it to their destinations. Lesson learned – go all the way up to the “official” postal counter.

Now on to Hue Vietnam….

Our taxi met us at the hotel at 6:30am for a 40minute drive to the airport. We had Pho at the recently renovated domestic terminal while we waited for our Vietnam Air flight that left on time for the small regional airport in Hue.

Hue airport is one of those great places where they load your luggage onto a small trail and literally drive it up to the terminal for you to collect the bag yourself from the cart. We got budget lucky and instead of a cab found a bus that got us ‘close’ to the hotel and only required Julia and I to walk 25 minutes to our accommodation in the muggy Hue morning. On our walk we found the town to be fairly dingy and setup for tourists – with a wide range of accommodation, food and entertainment options.

At the hotel yet again we were pretty much prevented from checking in until we’d agreed to book a tourist activity through the front desk – a boat trip to see a Pagoda and a day trip to visit three royal tombs. We checked into the room and found it and the whole hotel (for that matter the town) smelled musty and damp from a major rain storm that had passed through a couple days before – every time I got in the lift we joked that we might catch legionaries disease (not really a joking matter) and tried our hardest to hold our breath.

Decdiding that the room was to smelly to spend much time in it we hit the road for some lunch and then our boat ride up the Perfume River to the Pagoda of the Celestial Lady. We found that we were the only passengers on the dragon boat ride to the Pagoda – it appeared to be a very old mother and her adult son who ran the boat. Ju and I set ourselves on the rickety plastic lawn chairs and held on as we motored up the river – passing both modern and traditional river scenes (see photos).

The Pagoda itself was a highlight and well worth the visit. It’s from 1665 and has seven levels and a large old bell at the top. We spent 30 minutes or so strolling the grounds admiring butterflies, bonsai, frangipani trees not yet budded/leafed (watch our photos through the trip – in the north the trees hadn’t started to flower yet, but by the time we got to our last stop they were in full bloom).

We returned to the boat to be ferried back down the river to the Imperial City grounds/ruins. On the ride back the elderly mother approached us and handed sympathetic looking Julia a message written in English asking that we fund her by buying some of her souvenirs laid out on the floor. Julia had her eye on a tortes sculpture… so I got down on the floor of the boat and looked indifferently at the items and handed possible purchases up to Ju for inspection. She finally settled on one and her eyes sparkled the look that she gets when she must have something.,… unfortunately the woman saw thisJ. I asked how much and she signaled something like $12… I turned to Julia and said this would be a good opportunity to negotiate and that I wouldn’t offer more than $5 (all this said in front of the woman who I’m pretty sure didn’t speak English)… Ju pulled out her coin purse and produced $5… the woman looked grave and signaled more, so Julia pulled out another $1…. Again another signal that the woman needed more – I could see Ju was starting to get flustered and the woman could see that there was more money as Ju tried going back and forth between her large bills trying to find her next offer… I turned again to Ju and said “ she won’t stop asking for more as long as you continue looking through your purse, hand back the turtle and say you can’t pay more than $6” …. Ju considered this, decided to try this course of action… the woman looked startled to be handed back the turtle and the coin purse closed. The woman paused for a moment and then signaled that she would take $6 – Ju passed her first Negotiation 101 course J

We landed, turtle in hand on the bank of the river just outside the Imperial City. We lept off the boat into the muddy bak and thanked the man and woman (with a generous tip) for their time and waved goodbye. The imperial city is amazing and a surprise highlight from the trip… dating as far back as the 14^th century it was a key place of government for this region for many years right up until it was mostly destroyed during recent wars. Between what remains that is original and restored elements you can get a feel for the grandeur and scale of the place – we spent a good 1.5 hours wandering the grounds and looking at the beautifully decorated buildings and gates.

With dark settling in on the day we headed towards our hotel via the local market that was crowed, smelly and too loud for tired tourists.

Day 7 Hue, Royal Tomb Car Tour

We woke early for our hotel buffet breakfast of local food – I’m surprised we did not die from eating this room temperature food J, to cleanse the pallet and distract the mind from thoughts of food poisoning we found a hipster coffee shop that served delicious cold/ice coffees.

After coffees and a read of the local newspaper we caught our tourist cab for the tomb tour. First stop of the day was a road side stall where Julia made incense and then paid an extortionate amount to buy some incense and bamboo place mats.

Our tomb tour was well worth it as all three tombs are well preserved and show the changing taste across the 13 or so kings that ruled in the 18^th/19th/20^th century – its my understanding that none were damaged during the war.

The tombs visited were Tu Doc, Khai Dinh and Minh Mang – all beautiful in different ways – checkout the attached photos.



We got back to the hotel in the afternoon and decided to take a slow day by loading up on local beers, street food and watching a couple old Batman films.

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