A-Hué we Go!

There were no seats available on our train from Dong Hoi so we had to book beds for the journey to Hué. It being late afternoon and only three-ish hours away, we didn't get much shut-eye, but the lie-down proved beneficial when we reached Hué and, after barging our way through a throng of Vietnamese offering us ludicrously inexpensive taxi deals, discovered it was a thirty-five minute walk to the hotel.

But it was good to stretch our legs, see a bit of the city and having only walked about 12km so far that day, most of it up-hill to see a temple that turned out to be a cave, the prospect of an additional 3km with 15kg strapped to our backs was too tantalising to miss.

First impressions of Hué are that it feels like a far more modern city than Hanoi. By which I don't mean Hanoi isn't modern, by definition everything that literally exists now is modern, but I mean Hué feels more modern than some other places. Except for the ancient ruins, which feel old but not really all that ancient. I mean it's not the future like Tokyo or the past like Amish Country but closer to the middle than you might expect. I don't know what I mean.

The city economy is most definitely driven by tourism, with Hué being positioned as the perfect halfway destination for people travelling North-to-South or South-to-North and the only destination of note for those undertaking the very short and far less popular East-West route. There are an abundance of bars, restaurants, tour-operators, mini-marts and hotels, all of which we made use of in our first day (categorically, not literally). Our chosen hotel was down a narrow dark alley close to the wide, well-lit tourist streets.

'Chosen' is a somewhat grandiose descriptor for the process of selecting amongst the tiny percentage of hotels offering rooms to accommodate three adult males without infringing our night-time intimacy boundaries. But our hotel, 'The Times', is a lovely place with great facilities that I'm assured is in no way affiliated with the Murdoch empire.

After dropping off our laundry to be processed for the princely sum of a quid a kilo, we ventured out via a tour-operator, to book our following day's excursion, then on toward the former Imperial Citadel. En route, it began to rain so we popped into a shop to buy some umbrellas.

The umbrellas were of equivalent build-quality to a primary school kid's art project. You would tell them 'well done' and possibly hang on the handle of the fridge door, but wouldn't use outside lest the rain dissolve the papier-mâché canopy and weaken the lollypop-stick spokes, condensing the apparatus to a PVA-soaked mound atop a resistant yoghurt-pot handle.

But some form of portable sheltering was certainly required, most essentially for Mark so he could perform his visual documentation duties. In our tight role-based group structure it has evolved that Mark is our Planner, Co-ordinator and Photographer, I'm our Scribe and occasional Navigator and Woody is here too. Alas, the need to both hold his camera and umbrella in such a way that the umbrella also protected the camera proved difficult. This repeated reconfiguration of equipment, coupled with the frustration of idle tourists wandering into his perfectly framed shots at the very point of perfect shelter/shutter alignment, pushed our photographer to peak perturbation before we'd even entered the Imperial City gates.

Mark. Was. Furious. The anger eminating from his being only intensified when he noticed an interloper blotching his viewfinder in the form of a tiny dust-mite. Much as the Southern Vietnam troops occupying the citadel must have felt in January 1968 when, as part of the Tet Offensive, a Division-sized force of the People's Army of Vietnam and Viet Cong soldiers invaded, Mark was incensed by the intrusion and found it troublesome to extract. However, a quick Google search clarified this to in fact be an intentional in-built system designed to keep the aperture dust-free, confirming the mite to be a feature, not a bug.

The rain soon ceased and we wandered through the Citadel and Imperial City calm and dry. Outside the city walls we found two clusters of cannons. One set of five represented the different elements, smartly conserving bronze by eschewing the periodic table quantities for a more Captain Planet inspired approach. The remaining four cannons represented spring, summer, autumn and winter; whilst the capital city may have the Hanoi Hilton, Hué has the Four-Seasons Cannons (DID-YOU-SEE-WHAT-I-DID-THERE!?!)

There was much to see in the Imperial City: the ornate Throne Room, the former Forbidden City (patch of grass), nine dynastic urns opposite ten shrines for eight out of the thirteen emperors, the Reading Room, the Long Corridor, the Flag Tower, the Pavilion, the other Pavilion, gates, gates, more gates and gates being restored to their former gateness, several gardens, numerous courtyards, we fed some fish, had some ice-cream and for reasons hummed the A-Team theme-tune in harmonious adagio tempo. It was a full day, and took up most of it.

After walking over the river to the Dieu De National Pagoda it was surprisingly late in the day so we headed back toward the hotel. We stopped-off at the first supermarket we've seen to buy some interesting hot-dog pizza-breads for a late lunch which we followed with a round of not-sure-whats a lady was making on the street outside. They were like deep-fried sweet-bread doughnuts with sesame seeds and delicious. We also finally found some Dark Choco-Pies, which since I've not explained the ubiquity of the brand nor previously chronicled the quest to locate this particular variant will mean little to anybody except us.

In the evening we went out for food, accompanied by several good-quality beers that cost 30 pence each. We like Vietnam.Read more