Hue – Forbidden City
By reaching Hue I left the tropical area of Vietnam. It is raining, sometimes extremely intense and the palm trees disappeared. It is slightly cooler. Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam and the first question was if you can visit it in only one day, but because a lot of people do not even choose to stop in the city I thought that this may not be a problem. During the previous night dinner, that ended majestically with the flaming banana, I spoke with one of the guys from the restaurant who said that they do customized tours in town on motorbike. The next morning after I read more attentive the guide book and I noticed that most of the visiting sites are actually not inside the city but some of them are far out, I went to him to make arrangements. It exists also a tour by bus but I tried to avoid that, and I still don’t know if this was a good idea. The guy I spoke with was busy but arranged with a friend of his, and meanwhile I did my email and checked the blog and saw a show done by Victor and Claire after I emailed Cristina that I am looking at them. This is not easily done everytime because very few computers have Java installed. My guide came and first brought me to the post office to call home and I talked with both Victor and Claire.
After that I mount the motorbike and rode through rice paddys worked by peasants, to a Japanese Bridge, similar with the one in Hoian, but its location was very pleasant. Latter, he brought me to a pagoda that had a mass and the chanting and the atmosphere, with lots of believers swarming the place who came to pray, was very interesting. Here, Buddhism is the major religion and is very baroque, sometimes too baroque for my taste, extremely flamboyant and visual, so is good to shoot it on video. Buddhists are a majority and this was the reason why they entered in direct conflict with the Diem administration of South Vietnam who placed in top positions the Catholics. The mass was very interesting and from there we went to visit one of the imperial tombs.
The emperors from Nguyen dynasty , began at the beginning of the 18th century to built majestic tombs outside Hue. They built them in places they enjoyed and frequented during their lifetime and this lasted till late in the 19th century, before Bao Dai, the last emperor, came to power. He died in France in 1997 so he did not do anything like that. The tombs are impressive and is hard to believe that these were done so recently. The funny part was that the royal tomb is a very complex assembly with walls enclosing other walls till you get to the coffin, but the emperor is buried in another unknown place because he was afraid of theft, and all 200 people who help in the burial were killed. Unfortunately, I was able to visit only one tomb, the other being further away, and this is common in many day trips, you may have to choose what you see if you don’t want to stay more days. From there, we stopped to some Chinese tombs located nearby and further we visited a pagoda, where the monk who self immolated in 1963 lived. He was protesting against the Diem Regime in South Vietnam and his act was on the front page of all the newspapers in the world.
We visited a fishing village and another pagoda and finished with a visit to the citadel, that was originally large and it had its own Forbidden City, purple, for a particular reason, nowadays disappeared completely. The citadel named “The Imperial City”, was bombed heavily by Commies in the Tet offensive in 1968. Whatever was left intact, the Americans bombed at their turn, trying to dislodge the Viet Minh from the citadel, because they were able to hold the entire city under their rule for 3.5 weeks following the offensive. This bombing campaign happened during the battle of Hue in the American War. Still , the Vietnamese restored a part of it and is still enough to see but on the location of the Forbidden City Purple and two other palaces in the back is just grass and some bronze jars left. After the citadel we returned to the hotel , around 5pm, because at 6pm the bus for Hanoi was supposed to leave. I went to eat right near the hotel, some fish, and when I was eating somebody came to me and told me that the bus broke on the way from Hoian to Hue and we don’t know when we leave. I kept eating my fish when another guy came to me and told me that we should get quickly in a bus to go to another part of town to board the bus for Hanoi. I ate quickly the fish, the chips and the beer and jumped in the minibus, with the same group that followed me more or less : the girls from Malaysia, Sarah from London who was traveling now with an American girl and two boys from England. All 7 with lots of luggage in a taxi: you could not breath. The taxi brought us somewhere else in Hue and we boarded a bus from another company, that amazingly did not break. It stopped 3 times in the night, for dinner, pause and breakfast and brought us in 12 hours in Hanoi, but dropped us not in the Old Quarter but somewhere near the University. So, again we boarded a taxi all 7 and we got in the Old Quarter where we dispersed in various places and we may meet again. The way to Hanoi showed that we move towards North; it rained and it was cold and here people are dressed with scarves, jackets and cover their faces but is not so cold. It is chilly but not so bad, probably in the 16-17C.
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