The Road Goes Ever On

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Hue Imperial Palace, 1

The Imperial Palace, of the Nguyen Dynasty, dates from the early 19th century until the mid-20th, contemporaneous with the French "protectorate" of Vietnam. French/Vietnamese colonial history. Certainly worth a look if you're in Hue.

Huge moat around the Citadel and the Imperial Palace

Entrance building; well, one of them

Imperial koi

Feed me, feed me, over here on the left...

Many stages of entrances

Not going to picture all the halls and buildings

Helpful map of the environs

Less helpful model of the palace grounds, perhaps as they were, pre-1968

Moving right along

Imperial hot tub; seats 6

Imperial stamps; interesting how many of the artifacts survived...

Roof decor

The place is studded with interesting photographs from the 19th century, some
from French archives

One of many beautiful hall ways and arcades

Saturday, March 14, 2020

More Hue Scenes

BTW, it is pronounced "whey," as in what Little Miss Muffet was eating while sitting on her tuffet. Along with her curds. Just FYI.

Along the side street markets...motorscooter shopping...
seriously...they ride by, examining the wares, point, and
the merchant serves it up; and on to the next shop, never
getting off the bike

Our explorations took us along or across the Perfume River on a few occasions;
here is the line-up of boats waiting to take you five miles up the river to see the
Pagoda; and back; we met our pagoda quota in China years ago

The south side of the river was lined with a variety of attractive parks, including
a sculpture park

Spicy shrimp district in the huge, covered Dong Ba market

The market is definitely on everyone's tourist itinerary for Hue; I would caution
that this is no tourist market, as many others we've seen; very close quarters,
many touts and everyone anxious for your business; intense; an hour was plenty
for us

Hardware store

Hue traffic

Sic transit sick motorscooter, on a cyclo

What the well-dressed motor-cyclista wears in Hue

Perfume River from the main bridge to the Citadel

The DMZ bar and restaurant; Vietnamese owned and operated; we had lunch
here one day, more out of curiosity than anything else

The decor (here, the ceiling) is entirely of the war, but pitched to attract
foreigners, especially Americans, of whom there were not a few

AK-47 and M-16 door handles

The food was tasty even if the decor was not

Still on the south side of the river, residential construction

In the neighborhood where young people and tourists congregate

Another tree that has probably seen too much; a beautiful
old bouganvillea rising up past the third floor

Friday, March 13, 2020

Hue Scenes

The luxury van picked us up in Sapa early on February 25th and carried us, with only two luxury stops, to the Hanoi airport, arriving before 1PM. Alas, Bamboo Airlines doesn't permit check-in until 2 hours before departure, so we couldn't avail ourselves much time in the lounge. Alas. But it was a pretty crummy lounge anyway. We got to Hue just at sunset and a hotel taxi got us to our new home, the Alba Spa Hotel, pretty nice, just south of the Perfume River and the Citadel. The last several days being fairly intense, we just lazed for a day, pondering the future and trying to recover. The large hot water spa helped. Over the four days we were in Hue, the nation's capital during France's 19th-20th century "protectorate," we visited the Citadel and the Imperial Palace, the Don Ba market, and two of the Imperial Tombs outside of the city, each of which will warrant a post. Below are merely some of the Hue sights I encountered in my daily wanderings.

It is worth noting that this was our first venture into the former South Vietnam. Hue was one of the major battles in the war, from the 1968 Tet Offensive. It took three long weeks of bitter room-to-room fighting to retake Hue, a tactical victory for both the US and the ARVN. The Viet Cong was never again the factor they were prior to 1968, and most of the fighting, from the north, turned now to regular PAVN troops. 80% of this major city was destroyed, and several thousand of the city's leaders, down to neighborhood level, were massacred. Standard procedure for the VC. But, some historians (I read Max Hastings' monumental Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-75 while there) note, Hue was the turning point in US public opinion of the war. After Walter Cronkite's on-site report, Americans began to doubt what their leaders were telling them. LBJ is reputed to have observed, "If I've lost Cronkite, then I've lost Middle America." The war continued another seven years. For us, there was little joy in seeing this place, except for seeing how much changed and how much for the better it was for its people.

At the Hanoi airport: (western) capitalism triumphant! Drink
our coffee and you'll write like Hemingway, sing like Mozart
or Beethoven, invent like Tesla, command like Napoleon,
create like Leonardo...wait a second...Leonardo drank coffee?
Lavazza?!