Joyce in Okinawa: #6: Hué

I've gotten bored of posting about Vietnam, so I'm skipping a chunk of the trip and this will be my last entry.

From Hoi An, we took a 3 hour bus ride across the Sea Cloud Pass (a mountain pass from which one can get a terrific view... thus the name) to Hue. Hue was the capitol of Vietnam back in the 1700s. The city was founded by the Nyugen Dynasty on the northern bank of the Perfume river in central eastern Vietnam.

The Perfume River, Hue

The city was severely damaged in the 1968 Tet Offensive. However, there are still tons of temples, pagodas and tombs that have outlasted war and modernization. By the time we made it to this last leg of our journey we'd gotten a bit more travel-wise, realizing that the crowded tour buses were not a pleasant way to see the sites. Instead, we found a random Vietnamese dude in a bar who worked part time giving motorbike tours (each tourist has their own motorbike driver and just hangs on), rented our own motorbikes, and offered him a few bucks to lead us around in his free time. The catch: ah, you've got it! Joyce doesn't know how to ride a motorbike. Of course, there was the brief midnight lesson from Christina in Mui Ne. Luckily, Vietnam could care less if you have a bike license, a helmet, an ID... anything. They just want your $3, and will hand you a bike for a day. So off I went, swerving through the bustling streets of Nam, with cyclos, cars, rickshaws, cattle, pedestrians and other bikers on all sides. Terrifying, yet fun (though of course, no where near as fun as riding with the Boozefighters!)

The sites we went to were all pretty far outside the city. So we had some nice rides along country rice paddy roads (below, a photograph of rural Hue from the museum at the Japanese bridge). You haven't seen a pothole 'til you've been to Vietnam. Let me just say that.

One of the stops on our moto-tour was the most famous tomb in Hue: emperor Tu Duc (above). Tu Duc is not actually buried here. When he died, they buried him and all his treasure in a top-secret place. It was so secret that all 206 slaves who buried him here were BEHEADED. No one ever found Tu Duc's real tomb, because everyone who knew where it was died. Bad planning.

Above, a lake temple at Tu Duc's, and the mandarins that guard his tomb.

Here is a lotus flower floating on a pond outside a pagoda.

We stopped at a conical hat and incense making village on the way home. I talked to the woman making the hat in this photo about her work. She said it takes her an entire day to make one hat. But she makes 2,000 sticks of incense a day as well. One of these hats costs $1.