Days 118-119: Hue, Vietnam

We had an early morning flight out of Hanoi, which meant we arrived in Hue hours before our room would be ready. We used the opportunity to finally sample Pho at the time it’s supposed to be eaten – in the morning, for breakfast! We found a street side vendor who looked popular and had a couple bowls. The pho here has been good, but amazingly, not vastly better than the pho we were able to get in Boston. The same goes for a lot of the food we’ve had across Asia. Not that we haven’t been eating fantastic cuisine day and night, but we haven’t found many dishes we’d never at least seen on a menu before (except the fried spiders and assorted insects in Cambodia and some of the soup ingredients in Vietnam), nor have we found dishes that tasted radically different from what we were used to.

Hue was the capital of Vietnam for 150 years and there are many remnants of that time. In the old part of the city lies the Citadel, a large walled compound, with the Forbidden Purple City and Thai Hoa Palace inside. Hue is also home to at least four universities, and therefore also home to many students, for whom the evening time means sports! So I got to play some volleyball with the locals and go out drinking with them as well, which was a blast.

Up the river a bit from the city lie the tombs of three of the emperors whom ruled from Hue, providing for the kings to live the afterlife in the same style as they did their real life, much like the Egyptians (sans pyramids). The tombs also served as pleasure palaces for the emperors while still alive, featuring rooms for all their concubines, large stocked hunting grounds, and beautiful views. On the same cruise, we also visited a beautiful pagoda and an unremarkable temple, but a large part of the appeal was just being on the river.

I was shocked to see the amount of dredging going on in the river, to provide silt to fuel the construction going on in Hue and the surrounding areas. Apparently there are limestone mountains up river from Hue and their silt makes for excellent building material, but the massive dredging of the river is not surprisingly leading to big problems downstream, where there are large floods and the river is covering flood plains for more and more of the year. As frustrating as the lack of environmental awareness can be in the US, it’s clear that we have made a fair bit of progress. Vietnam, like most of the countries we’ve visited, has a fledgling environmental movement, but it’s largely powerless in the face of businesses eager to grow as quickly as possible.