Vietnam: First Night/Second Day: Hue

That night, after rushing back to the airport, I took a local flight from Hanoi to the 18th century capital city of Hue. Hue was the only city that the North Vietnamese were able to hold for more than a few days (in fact they held if for several weeks) after seizing it during the Tet Offensive. Bisected by the Perfume River, the city had a slower, prettier feel than Hanoi.












The view from my hotel balcony in the morning.

























A view of the Perfume River from the back of a motorbike.


My first terrifying ride on a motorbike!





Bullet holes in the wall surrounding a tomb complex.


The path around the wall to the tomb complex. Kids kept coming out of the forest on the right side trying to sell us stuff.

There two of them are now! I could never figure out where they were coming from, there didn't seem to be any dwellings or modern buildings around the place.

They opened these gates only once, to carry the Emporer's body into the tomb. Haven't opened them again since.

Met this from London, Sabrina, later in the trip. She was interesting and we talked about politics.

There's our tour guide, speaking first in Vietnamese and then in English, to try to explain the things we're seeing.

There's the entrance again.

From whence we came...

This is the top of the Perfume River, formed by the joining of two lesser rivers.

Then we went to the second of 3 tomb complexes for the day...

Blending in...

Tour guide and people on the tour.

The Emporer buried here while he was still alive, before 1933 I think.

Then we went to a small stretch of road outside of Hue where the locals made art, fans, conical hats, and (pictured here) colorful incense.

The most important items for sale, however, were liquids. I drank a lychee juice and then I drank some sort of Lipton's tea I think. It was so hot outside...

Then we went to the third and final tomb complex.

Bill and Colleen Dee were an incredibly interesting couple. He fought around Saigon during the war after the Tet Offensive while his brother fought farther north. After the war at some point, he married his Canadian wife, Colleen, and eventually they decided to come back to Saigon and teach English to the kids, which they are currently doing. His brother has no plans to ever return. They promised me information about teaching in Vietnam, and I need to follow up on that and see how they are doing. We talked about a lot of stuff, especially history, current Vietnamese (and Korean) politics, and the war.

Me on the other side of the lunch table with Laura (I think?) and a woman who was doing college in Thailand but had come back to visit her homeland whose name I've forgotten.

Sabrina, Bill, and Colleen; interesting people all.

After lunch we went to the Citadel, an ancient square-shaped oriental capital city, similar to those found in China and probably some places in Korea, too, in some ways. Inside, hundreds of bullet holes and impact marks commemorated the intense battles that took place during the 1968 Tet Offensive as, after 2-3 weeks of Communist control, the American and ARVN troops fought house-to-ancient-house to retake the old capital.

There were bullet holes in the elevated wooden part of this building. Apparently, the Americans were in there firing to the right back into the complex where the Communists were holed up.

Bill said that one of his big impressions of Vietnam before he went to war was a TV image of an American soldier and others pinned down just at the near side of the pictured bridge. He said the soldier stood up and ran somewhere else and something like his hat fell off, but that he seemed okay. Bill said he always wondered if that soldier had survived that battle, let alone the war. It was amazing to be in a place like this and to hear a story like that that took place in exactly this location.

The direction the Americans/ARVN were facing.

Crossing the bridge between some lotus ponds.

Fish feeding on something.

This reminds me of some cats I've had!

If you displeased the Vietnamese Emporer, apparently he had you boiled in one of these!

Bullet holes in the floor around the entrance to the mandarin's clothing area. I guess the Communists must have been inside this building at that point.

At this point in the day, my camera's battery started to die...
:(
A lot more to see, but I couldn't get pictures of most of it, tragically. I had left the spare battery back at the hotel.

This is a Buddhist statue from the pagoda on the Perfume River that became famous because it housed the monks who became famous for immolating themselves in protest of the Diem government's pro-Catholic/anti-Buddhist policies. Even as the war between the Communists and the American-supported Diem regime was raging, there was a miniature civil war taking place throughout the countryside between the Catholics and Buddhists, with disasterous consequences for the Buddhists.
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After the Buddhis pagoda, we all got on a medium-sized river boat and travelled a little bit to the point where we randomly were to be dropped. Bill, Colleen, and Sabrina were going for a beer and dinner and invited me to join them, which I desperately wanted to do, but the breakneck pace of my trip wouldn't allow it. I had fewer than 30 minutes to get to the Hue bus terminal before the last bus leaving for Da Nang would roll out, so I said hasty goodbyes to the friends I had made that day, envying them their uninterrupted comaraderie, and jumped in a taxi back to the hotel, then rode the hotel's motorbike taxi to the bus terminal, and rode a local bus, which the hotel had warned me was dangerous, for about 4 hours down the beautiful coast to Da Nang. Pictures of that next time.