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Hue (+Photos)

Posted on August 16, 2007

The next town on our march down the length of Vietnam from Hanoi was Hue. As mentioned previously, Hue was Vietnam’s imperial capital during 18th through early 20th centuries. The town is home to a massive citadel and compound created by the Nyugen emperors as well as many of their tombs. More recently, Hue was the first town south of the “DMZ” or “demilitarized zone”, the line drawn between the communist North and allied South during the Vietnam War.

We planned to spend just a couple of nights and one day in Hue to explore the citadel and possibly the tombs. We’d heard that the DMZ tours were just kind of a racket as there is nothing really to see and I didn’t think I could handle a visit to the memorial at My Lai. We did make it out to the citadel and imperial compound, which was really amazing. Not only was this place a full-on imperial city on the level of the Forbidden City in Peking, but it was also where the Vietcong camped out during the Tet offensive (the allied response to which took out nearly 2/3 of the gorgeous buildings - ugh). So touring around the compound was highly fascinating and resulted in many gorgeous photos. G was down for the count due to heat exhaustion and battling the vestiges of a cold he’d picked up in Hanoi, so I wandered around the grounds and imagined the imperial court life versus what it must have been like when the Vietcong was there. I heard snippets of tour guides explaining elaborate imperial ceremonies and protocols in one breath, and then the terrible loss of life and brutality of the occupying soldiers during the Tet offensive in the next. Vietnam is nothing if not a place of contradictions.

Unfortunately, the oppressive heat in Hue kept us from doing much else. We did find a bar called The DMZ that served the freshest and coldest draught beer we’ve found in SE Asia so we mostly availed ourselves of that and our hotel’s A/C. We also ate several bowls (sometimes at one sitting!) of Bun Bo Hue - which is the classic Vietnamese beef noodle soup with basil, mint, and lime. Another item to add to our list of things we’ve had before at home but that taste a million times better here. I managed to get a mani/pedi and then we hopped a bus out of town for our next destination, Hoi An.

Or, view the flickr slideshow (watch it full-screen!)

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