Hue, the Imperial City

We decided to take the overnight sleeper train from Hanoi to Hue. We’ve taken them plenty before in India and were interested to compare. First of all, tickets were pretty easy to buy online, unlike in India. When we got to the station, it was calm and a lady asked to see our tickets and told us our options for storing luggage while we went to find food for the train. I never saw luggage storage in India, unless you paid a red cap porter to stand beside your bags while you wander around. Finally, it was easy and calm to find our coach and board our train. No pushing or shoving or screaming while you run up and down the platform hoping to find your basically unlabelled car.  

Some of the sleepers on this route have been renovated. This one was not one of them or, if it was, I’d hate to see the before picture. It was a 4 berth compartment with a closing door and it was on the shabbier end. No plug for charging electrics. Well, there was one, but you couldn’t use it without turning off the lights. No fresh sheets on these trains, just a pad on the thin bunk, a pillow with no pillowcase and a blanket. I was glad for my silk sleeping bag. 

We started out alone in our compartment, which was handy while I devoured my banh mi. A Vietnamese couple joined us at the next stop so we went up to our sleeper berths. It was a comfy enough space once we figured out how to turn down the ac vents from the meat locker setting. There was a loudspeaker close to our heads that we figured out how to turn off. Until then, it was like the goddess was talking directly into your skull to let you know the next stop in 3 languages. I can’t say I slept much, but we have been active and it was nice just to be horizontal.

During the night I got down from my bunk to go to the bathroom, only to find the compartment door handle on the floor and the mechanism to put it back on almost worked out to the outside. We were locked in our compartment, everyone was sound asleep and I had to pee! I fought down a sense of panic as I tried reattaching the handle and working every part of the mechanism, but it wouldn’t reattach. I poked K in the leg and woke her up. She didn’t know how to reattach it either. Finally, the fella in one of the bottom bunks woke up and trained his phone flashlight on it while I managed to find a small button that released the latch, averting a disaster.

The next morning our stop was to be at 8:45 and we knew we had 5 minutes to get off while a crowd of people tried to get on. At 8:20 the loudspeaker beside our heads screeched a shrill little tune I like to call ”wake up, motherfuckers!”

The off/on the train 5 minute battle did remind me of India. People desperate to get off or on a train with limited time are similar in their pushiness. That it was pouring rain, 8:45 am and our homestay check-in time was 2 pm didn’t improve my mood.  

We got a Grab and went to drop off our bags at the homestay, expecting to be roaming in the rain all day in the previous days clothes, but our homestay owner had a pleasant surprise for us. Our room was being cleaned and we were in it by 10 am. He was very helpful throughout our stay with recommendations of good veg restaurants, nice places to walk and tours to take. We have been blessed with some great hosts.

Hue, pronounced Hway due to accents my keyboard can’t replicate, is an old Imperial city and was the home of the emperors until that all fell apart from 1945 onward. The official story in Hue is that the last emperor/king handed power to Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh in 1945, although the Communist Party of Vietnam says otherwise and considers him a pro-French traitor, and other sources vary as to the whos, whys and wherefores of his abdication. His old emperor stomping grounds were inside the Purple Forgotten City inside the Citadel on the Old Imperial side of Hue.

It was raining miserably the day we did our city tour, including the tour of the Purple Forbidden City. Our guide was extremely patriotic and spouted some things we knew weren’t factual, so his veracity around the history was questionable. The complex is along the banks of the Perfume River, with three levels of moat and walled city. The common people would have lived and set up shops in the outermost ring of the city. Then there is another moat and the Citadel walled city with specific entrances for royalty, civil mandarins, military mandarins, horses and elephants. That level has 4 fancy entrances and was where government work was done. We entered the Noon gate of the Citadel to see all the ladies in rented authentic dress having their photos done with the fancy restored buildings as background. The next level was the Purple Forbidden City, which I was sad to see WAS NOT PURPLE. Our guide said purple is the colour of loyalty and only those loyal to the king, including his king and concubines (and their eunuchs) could be in the innermost layer of that city. All others were forbidden, hence the name. Way less fun than I had imagined.

The few buildings on the site are mainly reconstructions. It was heavily bombed by the Americans during the war and the buildings destroyed. There is an intention to eventually reconstruct all of it. All that are left of many of the buildings are photos and foundations. It’s a site that requires the use of your imagination, but it’s still quite winsome with the restorations,  remnants and overgrowth. 

The reason we didn’t do the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone between the north and the south) tour was that we read it was similar. There are tunnels but the rest is “look at the landscape and imagine what it was like.” If time and money were unlimited, I may have done it, but spending a rainy day in a field while paying a tour guide and bus didn’t seem like a good use of our resources. I can imagine from a dry cafe with a nice tea in front of me. There are American bunkers all over the place anyway, so they are nothing new to see.

The tombs of past emperors were much more interesting to go see if one absolutely needed to be flailing about in the rain, as we apparently did. Past emperors made sure they were remembered by building gorgeous monument areas to themselves and, in the case of an emperor without children, he wrote his own eulogy on a massive slate, front and back. The front gates of one of the tombs looked like the the world’s scariest movie orphanage. 

Our tour included eating our lunch during a trip down the Perfume River on a dragon boat. That was pretty cool and a nice break from getting soaked and hawker ladies trying to get us to buy raincoats and umbrellas. Lunch was tasty as well and these fellow veggies knew how to share the food.

If it sounds like I’m whining about the rain, I most certainly am. This is the dry season and it’s only supposed to rain over 3 days in the entire month of March in an average year, but it has rained here for a week and we are not pleased. It’s tricky enough dodging scooters, automobiles and bikes without getting an umbrella in the eye. 

One thing I haven’t been writing about are the massages. Massages here are cheap and there are ladies every few feet trying to get you to their shop. They all do foot or head/shoulder massages and some do full body or mani-pedis or facials. We have been getting at least a foot and leg massage every few days. Hue was the pinnacle of leg massages. We had our feet soaked in an herbal tea (not unusual but this had a lot of herbs and spices) and then had to change into shorts. They laid us down in a massage room and worked us from hips to toes for an hour and topped it off with some neck and shoulders for good measure. It was the kind of massage that hurts and releases and relaxes all at the same time. We tipped these ladies well but they really deserved an award. 

Saigon has a lot of massage parlours that seem to offer more happiness, but we have avoided those so far.