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

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?!

Hanoi airport view from the Bamboo lounge

Friendly skies of Bamboo

Another gorgeous room in another gorgeous hotel...Vicki is so good at this

Hotel landscaping...back in the tropics

Corona deviled eggs?

First serving of my sushi extravaganza one night at the hotel

The neighborhood

Today's wedding pix

Today's influencer pix...what are these people going to do now?

Favorite Hue T-shirt

Vietnamese hat rack

Seriously; a well-stocked Harry Potter shoppe

Our hotel room overlooked the local police academy, providing endless
entertainment

Riot gear, riot suppression practice; when in our camper, we often felt safer
parking by the gendarmerie; here, we were not quite so sure...

Sapa Scenes

After the trek we wanted to see a bit more of Sapa itself...

My most abiding impression of Sapa...the construction everywhere; here, another
giant hotel going up behind the barrier next to the older stately Sun Plaza

Not free range

Four boys on a scooter...

"Amazing Hotel" next to ours; almost any English will sell

Still processing this

German tourist (I was hoping he'd be Dutch) carrying his own group-size hand
sanitizer; a symbol of our times...

City square

Outside Sapa's cathedral

Downtown scenes

Sapa Lake; smack in the middle of the city

Alas, do not change colors

Most of the seafood restaurants featured catfish or some variant

But here are trout!

Beautiful wood carving/sculpture everywhere

Even as we were walking around the lake in the afternoon, dense clouds came
over the mountains

And the city was enveloped in one of the worst white-outs I've ever seen