Far, far away,
That's where my heart is yearning, ever,
That's where the Kinh folk stay..."
Here are photos of our stay in Hue, pronounced "hway". The main attraction was the Citadel, containing the "Forbidden Purple City", or Imperial City. There's a good description of the complex here. Click here for an excellent walking tour for an armchair traveller - that sounds contradictory, but it's not.
We saw a few tombs of the Nguyen Emperors, of which there were 13 before the last one abdicated in 1945; the last several were basically puppets of the French. The building of the Citadel began only 200 years ago, at the dawn of the 19th Century. It was 90% obliterated by American bombing in reaction to the Tet Offensive of 1968, but the remaining 10% is still impressive and interesting to see. Vietnam is slowly restoring the rest, piece by piece.
Our sweet young desk clerk in Hoi An put us on the Hahn Café bus - one of two that Deb had sworn we'd never take. Not sure why the girl chose it...better commission, perhaps; but we had too much trust and didn't check the name of the bus company when she assured us it would be a good bus.
Later, we confirmed that Hahn Café is the cheapest bus by far, and so she must have just pocketed the difference. We had another fast and dangerous driver, with scads of garbage from previous trips still on board. There was dust and grime on the windows and all the surfaces. The driver drove fast to make up for the time he lost parking at a restaurant for a half an hour, much longer than the time it would take to pee except for the fact that there were four other buses at the same restaurant and none at the others down the street.
The restaurant owner, for some reason, decided to pick on me to make an example of his displeasure. He blocked my way to join an already very long line from five buses at the toilets and demanded that I buy something from his store before I used his toilets. I told him I'd just gotten off the bus and had to pee before I would consider buying anything, but he continued to insist, very loudly and aggressively, until I told him he was being very rude and should stand aside and let me pee. Finally he swore at me and moved. After I used his toilet I made a point of eating a sandwich we'd brought with us in Deb's backpack in front of him. I wanted a chance to say, "Take it up with the bus company", and "You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar", but he got too busy serving other costumers.
We rode our dirty bus over a mountain range spur that stretched down to the sea, so there was a bit of excitement on the hairpin turns and some good scenery - what little you could see through the grimy windows - but most of the trip wasn't very scenic, it was just four hours of earsplitting honking from our bus driver as he drove through many miles of something halfway between rural and suburban landscape.
We rode our dirty bus over a mountain range spur that stretched down to the sea, so there was a bit of excitement on the hairpin turns and some good scenery - what little you could see through the grimy windows - but most of the trip wasn't very scenic, it was just four hours of earsplitting honking from our bus driver as he drove through many miles of something halfway between rural and suburban landscape.
We did go through a tunnel six kilometres long that cuts an hour from the journey, which obliterated some of the scenic view. I slept through the tunnel, surprisingly - but Deb says "no surprise" with regard to the tunnel itself because no-one was allowed to overtake the vehicle ahead in the tunnel, so the honking stopped mercifully during that transit. I'm guessing it would have been pretty deafening bouncing off the tunnel walls from all sides. We sat too close to the front because the pair of seats we chose had more leg room than the rest, but we paid for our choice. I should have had my ear plugs ready.
At least we arrived at the advertised address in Hue, and things looked much better when our hotel owner met us at the bus with a little printed sign that contained her hotel name and her version of my name, "Stefan". Deborah was pleased to learn that her name, Hong (pronounced "Hawm") meant "bee", as Deborah's name does. (You always close your lips on a word ending in "ong" in Vietnamese.)
Hong helped us carry our bags half a block to her Vietnamese hotel, and intelligently up-sold us to a larger balcony room at the front. There are only two rooms per floor; we hiked up three flights of stairs with our backpacks. There was no elevator. I have a knee that complains when I do that, but we made it.
The tiny back windowless rooms are more quiet - tomb-like, almost; all hotels like this seem to have a smaller inner room on each floor that is much quieter than the ubiquitous street-side balcony room - and all the rooms have air conditioning; but Deb was happier with the extra space and the natural light in this room. The traffic noise was our alarm clock, and came too early. The bathroom is uncomfortably cramped, and the hot water, we learned the next morning, only lasts for a minute - then you have to turn it off and wait for it to heat back up. The owner was eager to fill her rooms, and gave us a deal which included breakfast - definitely still a tourist price rather than a Vietnamese price, but well within our self-imposed and stingier-than-necessary budget, so my inner socialist reluctantly agreed.
The sad thing, I discovered, is that this isn't even the hotel we thought we'd booked. The owners have two hotels, one just a few steps from here down a narrow alley - with a lovely restaurant and pool, an elevator, and a big bathroom with a proper shower stall. When you google the bus delivery address and search for nearby hotels, the owner's site pops up with details and photos of the better hotel, but the prices for this one. The reason Hong met us at the bus was to make darn sure we didn't walk to the wrong building! Another classic bait-and-switch advertising. We are learning, step by painful step, all the ways that we can get tricked by vendors, taxi and cyclo drivers, and hotel staff in Vietnam; we'll have to double-check everything from now on, and try to think ahead of every possible wrinkle that might be applied to our requests.
The next day we also got short-changed on by the ticket agent at the Citadel. We almost lost a quick $5; but I do mental math quickly and Deb didn't pick up her change off the desk until the missing 100,000 VND miraculously appeared along with the other bills, with no argument from the cool-as-a-cucumber ticket agent. We read about someone who was short-changed the same way at two out of three of the Royal Tombs they visited, and heard that it is a commonly reported problem. The technique is that the agent will ask for a smaller bill as well to round out the change, and then short-change you: "It costs 210. You give me 20, I'll give you back 10, then I'll give you change for your 500..." Suddenly you have several bills of unfamiliar currency with more zeroes than most tourists ever have to count in their own currency, and a line-up of people waiting behind you to buy their tickets, and unless you're quick and sharp, you'll find yourself short 100,000. Once you pick up your bills and walk away from her table, the deal is done, there's no going back - she's already making change for the next customer, and the guard who is closely watching the transaction and probably gets a cut will shoo you away from the table.
Jan 6th: our hotel hostess served us beef noodle soup for breakfast, plus coffee, banana and oranges. We hiked to the Citadel neighbourhood and then met Hien and Thu for lunch. They're both post-grad chemistry students, and quite sweet on each other, which was very cute. They took us to a local restaurant on the back of their scooters. After lunch they ran us over to the train station to buy our onward tickets to Hanoi for the 8th, but the train station was closed while the wicket agents took lunch, so they dropped us at the bridge leading to the entry gate to the Citadel. Thu was feeling quite ill. We paid to go inside the Citadel and did our tour, and took lots of photos. By then Thu had recovered and when Hien finished work they both took us to the train station once again. While we were studying the schedules they closed the wickets again, for unspecified "technical problems", so we went for coffee, and by the time we came back the wickets were open and tickets were being sold. All the signage is in Vietnamese, so it is a good thing we had Hien and Thu with us, although a couple of other young ladies in line also seemed to speak excellent English, as did the agent.
The train is three or four times more expensive than the sleeper bus, but Deborah really wanted this experience, so that's how we'd arrive in Hanoi on the morning of the 9th - hopefully refreshed from a night in a "soft sleeper compartment for four". Price: One million, six hundred and 10 thousand Vietnamese Dong.
We invited Hien and Thu for supper, and Hien invited another friend named Ngoc, a student doing his Masters in the same branch of chemistry. The restaurant was rowdy with a party going on, so it was a bit difficult to perform our helpful role as people to practice English with, but we managed. It cost the same for five of us to share a plate of squid, a fried catfish, a fish hot pot and several Huda beer (the local brewery) for the three guys as Deborah and I would have paid for the same meal for only the two of us at a restaurant that caters to tourists, in our hotel district.
Hien and Thu volunteered to take us the next day to a couple of nearby royal tombs of the Nguyen Emperors. Afterward I planned to help Hien with a powerpoint presentation he had to make two weeks hence in English. For our evening's entertainment, Ngoc invited us for coffee so he could have a chance to practice speaking with us for an hour. Another win-win for Couchsurfer friends...
After a fruit plate and coffee for breakfast on January 7th, Hien and Thu picked us up and delivered us to the three main Royal Tombs that are worth seeing. We bought them lunch, but they ordered for us, making sure that we tried a great many traditional dishes, including rice cooked in the traditional way in a clay pot; and we bought gas for their motorbikes. After our coffee date with Ngoc, we went to try various rice "cakes", some wrapped in leaves, which are also very traditional food in Hue.
After breakfast the next morning we helped Hien with his English Powerpoint presentation. We caught spelling mistakes and helped him decide sentence structure and ways to present the research of his group, who are synthesizing gold nanorods (extremely tiny crystals, essentially) coated in a silica shell for targeting cancer tumours. It took about two hours of discussing the four factors that they have identified that must be optimal for a high yield of the nanorods, and purifying them from the byproduct of nanospheres of silica. Then Hien and Thu took us for yet another typical Hue meal that the average tourist wouldn't get to eat, which included bowls of shrimp soup and noodles into which we stirred a very hot chili sauce to our own tastes, and bowls of quail eggs. We checked out of our room but kept our bags at the hotel until 5, when we'd taxi over to the train station for our journey to Hanoi. In Hanoi we would staying with a young Vietnamese doctor and her husband who invited us, out of the blue, to be their Couchsurfing guests.
The sad thing, I discovered, is that this isn't even the hotel we thought we'd booked. The owners have two hotels, one just a few steps from here down a narrow alley - with a lovely restaurant and pool, an elevator, and a big bathroom with a proper shower stall. When you google the bus delivery address and search for nearby hotels, the owner's site pops up with details and photos of the better hotel, but the prices for this one. The reason Hong met us at the bus was to make darn sure we didn't walk to the wrong building! Another classic bait-and-switch advertising. We are learning, step by painful step, all the ways that we can get tricked by vendors, taxi and cyclo drivers, and hotel staff in Vietnam; we'll have to double-check everything from now on, and try to think ahead of every possible wrinkle that might be applied to our requests.
The next day we also got short-changed on by the ticket agent at the Citadel. We almost lost a quick $5; but I do mental math quickly and Deb didn't pick up her change off the desk until the missing 100,000 VND miraculously appeared along with the other bills, with no argument from the cool-as-a-cucumber ticket agent. We read about someone who was short-changed the same way at two out of three of the Royal Tombs they visited, and heard that it is a commonly reported problem. The technique is that the agent will ask for a smaller bill as well to round out the change, and then short-change you: "It costs 210. You give me 20, I'll give you back 10, then I'll give you change for your 500..." Suddenly you have several bills of unfamiliar currency with more zeroes than most tourists ever have to count in their own currency, and a line-up of people waiting behind you to buy their tickets, and unless you're quick and sharp, you'll find yourself short 100,000. Once you pick up your bills and walk away from her table, the deal is done, there's no going back - she's already making change for the next customer, and the guard who is closely watching the transaction and probably gets a cut will shoo you away from the table.
Jan 6th: our hotel hostess served us beef noodle soup for breakfast, plus coffee, banana and oranges. We hiked to the Citadel neighbourhood and then met Hien and Thu for lunch. They're both post-grad chemistry students, and quite sweet on each other, which was very cute. They took us to a local restaurant on the back of their scooters. After lunch they ran us over to the train station to buy our onward tickets to Hanoi for the 8th, but the train station was closed while the wicket agents took lunch, so they dropped us at the bridge leading to the entry gate to the Citadel. Thu was feeling quite ill. We paid to go inside the Citadel and did our tour, and took lots of photos. By then Thu had recovered and when Hien finished work they both took us to the train station once again. While we were studying the schedules they closed the wickets again, for unspecified "technical problems", so we went for coffee, and by the time we came back the wickets were open and tickets were being sold. All the signage is in Vietnamese, so it is a good thing we had Hien and Thu with us, although a couple of other young ladies in line also seemed to speak excellent English, as did the agent.
The train is three or four times more expensive than the sleeper bus, but Deborah really wanted this experience, so that's how we'd arrive in Hanoi on the morning of the 9th - hopefully refreshed from a night in a "soft sleeper compartment for four". Price: One million, six hundred and 10 thousand Vietnamese Dong.
We invited Hien and Thu for supper, and Hien invited another friend named Ngoc, a student doing his Masters in the same branch of chemistry. The restaurant was rowdy with a party going on, so it was a bit difficult to perform our helpful role as people to practice English with, but we managed. It cost the same for five of us to share a plate of squid, a fried catfish, a fish hot pot and several Huda beer (the local brewery) for the three guys as Deborah and I would have paid for the same meal for only the two of us at a restaurant that caters to tourists, in our hotel district.
Hien and Thu volunteered to take us the next day to a couple of nearby royal tombs of the Nguyen Emperors. Afterward I planned to help Hien with a powerpoint presentation he had to make two weeks hence in English. For our evening's entertainment, Ngoc invited us for coffee so he could have a chance to practice speaking with us for an hour. Another win-win for Couchsurfer friends...
After a fruit plate and coffee for breakfast on January 7th, Hien and Thu picked us up and delivered us to the three main Royal Tombs that are worth seeing. We bought them lunch, but they ordered for us, making sure that we tried a great many traditional dishes, including rice cooked in the traditional way in a clay pot; and we bought gas for their motorbikes. After our coffee date with Ngoc, we went to try various rice "cakes", some wrapped in leaves, which are also very traditional food in Hue.
After breakfast the next morning we helped Hien with his English Powerpoint presentation. We caught spelling mistakes and helped him decide sentence structure and ways to present the research of his group, who are synthesizing gold nanorods (extremely tiny crystals, essentially) coated in a silica shell for targeting cancer tumours. It took about two hours of discussing the four factors that they have identified that must be optimal for a high yield of the nanorods, and purifying them from the byproduct of nanospheres of silica. Then Hien and Thu took us for yet another typical Hue meal that the average tourist wouldn't get to eat, which included bowls of shrimp soup and noodles into which we stirred a very hot chili sauce to our own tastes, and bowls of quail eggs. We checked out of our room but kept our bags at the hotel until 5, when we'd taxi over to the train station for our journey to Hanoi. In Hanoi we would staying with a young Vietnamese doctor and her husband who invited us, out of the blue, to be their Couchsurfing guests.
Next entry: Riding on the Sleeper Train
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