Travelogue :  Kyvan's Southeast Asia Adventure

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Nov 24, 2005
Hue: Tombs, tombs, and more tombs
 

To get to Hue, we passed Son Tra, which is a knobby shaped peninsula off the coast of Da Nang. Apparently, it shields Da Nang from flooding during the wet seasons.

So we slept in Hue and in the morning, I ate a dish I had been waiting to eat until we got to this city - bun bo Hue (vermicelli beef noodle soup Hue style.) It was a delicious, mouth-watering soup, with beef so tender and fragile it breaks at the touch, and a squeeze of two limes activates the immense flavor of the soup base.

I guess the thing to do in Hue is to see tombs. Tombs, mausoleums, palaces, of past Vietnamese Kings who had numerous wives and even more concubines. So the first was the Minh Mang Mausoleum, a pretty, quiet, spacious, ancient place. We past one temple, past lovely gardens to the next temple where his "spirit" rests, then past peaceful ponds towards the hill where his body is buried, which was locked and enclosed behind a rusty iron gate. I peeked through the doors to see grass and trees. This place is surrounded by lakes and is shaped very symmetrically. I was told from a birds-eye view, the Minh Mang Mausoleum resembles a person.

Then off to Kinh Thanh Trieu Nguyen (Palace of the Nguyen Dynasty) - an extremely large system of buildings which collectively make up the palace. This time we had heavy rain! Cold, heavy rain. Of course that didn't dampen my mood because I love rain. But this moist weather lately has reminded me of a hippo - it is persistently wet!

At night, we took a boatride down Song Huong (Perfume River) past Cau Truong Tien (bridge) whereupon we saw a singing performance of traditional Hue music. The voices of three women harmonized, overlapping their pitches, thickening the sound. Their signature song was, "Hue dep oi" (Hue is so pretty.) After the performance, we lit candles and released them into the river, seeing them flicker and float upstream. And as their flames were snuffed, so too did our day end, in order to prepare for tomorrow's new day towards the brilliant Phong Nha caves.