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Published: February 3rd 2009
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Lilly at Thien Mu Pagoda
Along the Perfume River in Hue Greetings!
Here's the lowdown from our nine days in central Vietnam.
After finally convincing Jub we shouldn't fly to the southern beach resort of Phu Quoc Island based solely on reports he'd heard that all the dogs there have blue tongues, we caught a puddle jumper six hundred miles north to Hoi An. Once a thriving port city, Hoi An is now known for its cuisine, innumerable custom tailors and cobblers, and well preserved old-town architecture. This proved to be a winning combination, and we spent our first days in town strolling through centuries-old clan meeting halls and mansions, all rendered highly photogenic by layers of peeled paint and exposed brick caused by regular monsoonal flooding of the town's main river--many buildings had lines drawn on the walls indicating the highest point of each year's flood. We usually started our sight-seeing around 8, and called it quits in the late morning when the big tour buses rolled in (Anna: "This house is 300 years old, can the porch really handle 50 Germans!?!" Jub: "Word . . . let's grab lunch.") In the afternoons, Jub managed to resist buying knockoff '88 Air Jordans, but Anna got to learn all of
her measurements in centimeters, as the ludicrously cheap wool pea coat samples that popped up on mannequins around every turn proved irresistible; we can only hope we see our bevy of coats again, since we later traded them for a piece of paper, written in Vietnamese, supposedly stating that they are due to arrive in the Portland by (possibly sail) boat sometime in June. Hoi An's food was also as advertised. We ate our favorite meals on the front porch of a house near out hotel, where the family served up great street food at around a dollar a meal, including Anna's favorite local dish, cao lầu--rice noodles in beef broth, topped with sliced pork and lots of fresh herbs, into which you crumble crouton-like wafers. Hoi An also served as our introduction to Vietnam's famous Bia Ho'i, a bready tasting beer made without preservatives and delivered by breweries every morning in cold kegs that are best drunk that same day. Pints are a ridiculously cheap $0.15, which meant we were hard pressed to spend more than a dollar fifty between us when we went out at night, but also meant that we needed to have our 500-count bottle of
Just like royalty
Making fools of ourselves in a Hoi An shop Aleve within arm's reach when we finally turned in.
We also spent three days exploring the area just outside of Hoi An. On our first day, we cruised the surrounding countryside on a motor-scooter, whizzing by duck ponds and rice paddies dotted with water buffalo and farmers, calling it quits when the skies darkened ominously, and shortly after we thought we had out-run a small pack of dogs who, it turned out, were just resting up for their second chance to nip at our legs when the cross-paddy trail we were on dead-ended outside a cemetery, forcing us to retrace out steps. Next, we woke at 5:00 and drove an hour east to My Son, a group of carved brick temple ruins set in a lush river valley that were beautiful enough in the mist and soft light of dawn, but that reportedly rivaled the grandeur of Ankgor Wat for over a thousand years until U.S. B52's carpet bombed 80% of it to dust in '69 after VC soldiers began using the temples to shelter supplies coming over the nearby boarder with Laos. On our third day, we headed north and toured the sights around Danang, including the now
nurse-less but still impressively white-sanded China Beach, and Marble Mountain, a towering granite outcropping whose heights revealed a half-dozen Buddhist temples, and two impressive caves, one of which was filled with hundred-foot long beams of sunlight that illuminated more Buddhist imagery, a small shrine, and a plaque dedicated to a VC woman's artillery battery that reportedly used its position high on the mountain to down nineteen American aircraft.
At the end of the day, we caught a train north to Huế (<--this sentence rhymes). Huế served as Vietnam's capital from the 18th century founding of the Nguyen dynasty until the emperor abdicated power to the communists in 1945. After arriving, we explored the massive, walled and moated Citadel, which houses Vietnam's forbidden city--once the exclusive domain of the emperor and his court. The area saw intense house to house fighting during the Tet offensive (inspiring the battle scenes in "Full Metal Jacket"), and the U.S. only ousted the VC after bombing most of the imperial enclosure to smithereens. The remaining structures offered a glimpse of how strikingly beautiful the forbidden city must once have been, although we found it amazing that we could walk around on the ornate tiles
Flooded Riverfront of Hoi An
The daily high tide flooded the street along the river, but the locals didn't seem to mind. of the emperor's former bedroom, still laying shattered in the mud forty years later. Despite what the residents of Huế must have been through, we found the city friendly and laid-back, and the only one we've visited to date where the motor-scooters didn't completely outnumber the bicycles--which were usually being ridden around town by two people, one on the seat, and one sitting on back on the hard metal newspaper holder with his/her feet stretched forward, helping the main rider peddle.
While in Huế, we had three excellent meals at Lac Thien, a restaurant run by a super friendly deaf mute family, several of whom pulled up seats at our table each night to drink beer and engage in visually aided conversations about old pictures, the family tree, what we did that day, and the disconcerting fact that competing restaurants with identical menus called Lac Thian and Lac Thein recently opened on either side of their place. We also scootered out to a half dozen impressive tombs that the Nguyen emperors built for themselves (often beginning work immediately upon ascending to the throne), which were well preserved, and replete with multiple temples and pagodas, Pebble Beach quality landscaping, epic
Creative footwork
Cobbler shop in Hoi An stone-inscribed poems, carved guardian animals, and housing for their concubines, who were expected to remain on-premises following the emperor's death. On our last day, we toured the former DMZ with a fantastic Vietnamese guide who spent three years in the area (mostly at Khe Sahn) as a scout and translator with the Third Infantry Division, and then four years in a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon. He took us through bullet-scarred buildings around Quang Tri, and to former fire bases along the McNamara line, including Doc Mieu, and Con Thein--which have largely been reclaimed by the jungle, but where we could still make out the former roads and command bunkers, which our guide helped bring alive with stories of his time there as a wide-eyed teenager leading patrols into the surrounding, occupied hills by day, and getting drunk with G.I.'s. at night. In the afternoon, we toured the Vinh Mok tunnel complex, where several hundred north Vietnamese villagers spent portions of two years living thirty to fifty feet underground in shafts and small living rooms that they hand dug through hard clay to escape nearby U.S. bombing along the DMZ.
Thanks for reading, if you made it
The poor goat (and Jub)
One of the old family meeting halls in Hoi An this far. Stay tuned for pictures and stories from Hanoi and Vietnam's far northern provinces.
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non-member comment
hue. hoi. hi.
perhaps in my excitement about the reality of a place called Hoi, I failed to notice that all the pic labels with the word Hue were referring to a place. susan just pointed out that you were not indeed calling attention to the color balance of the shots. I will read more carefully next post. but great hue in these shots. love the faces of the people here. s wants to know how the 15c beers are.