Hue, Vietnam

On returning from Halong Bay, we had about an hour to kill in Hanoi before embarking on our great bus adventure, an open-tour ticket which we were counting on to carry us down the length of Vietnam in time for Lindsey to catch her flight home from HoChiMinh City in the wee hours of the morning on the 6th. As evening fell, we, along with about 30 other people, loaded up into a very cramped sleeper bus. These buses have sets of bunks three across and two deep, which let you semi-recline, tuck your knees to your chest, and dream away a whole night's travel. That's the idea at least. Taller folks were in especial trouble on this first, and most uncomfortable leg of the trip, as even I, at 5'3", couldn't stretch out in my berth. Here we are, all tucked in.

12 hours and a few winks of sleep later, we pulled into Hue, the Imperial Capital of the Nguyen Dynasty and otherwise a rather deserted and appealing little town. This dynasty ruled from around 1800 to the mid-1900s, though for much of that time it was more or less a puppet-regime of the French, but the relative modernity of their leadership meant that the tombs and monuments they left behind have a quality of ghostly reality that the more rebuilt monuments of more ancient times sometimes lack. We spent an afternoon wandering around the beautiful and crumbling tomb complex of Emperor Tu Doc.

The next morning Lindsey and I walked down to the Citadel, a big area which encompassed the Vietnamese equivalent of Beijing's Forbidden City as well as government and staff buildings. The main difference, in addition to it's less impressive age, is that the Hue Citadel had been extensively bombed by American forces in the 60s. With only small areas yet reconstructed, the contrast between the still-standing living quarters and the bombed out ruins was powerful and again left us with the impression of a very living history. Scattered among the imperial remnants are the agricutural plots that have been converted back for the living use of more average Vietnamese.

As a side note, in both of the sites we visited in Hue, the beautiful mosaics made of pottery shards stood out for me as both unexpectedly lovely and in some ways more modest compared to the Imperial magnificence that ancient Chinese dynasties have left us.