Hue

Wednesday, April 9th - Arriving in Hue

We arrive in Hue at dinner time. It's already dark, and the streets are bustling in a way that we haven't seen since Hanoi, but in a slightly less chaotic way. There is still a lot happening everywhere you look, but there is more space for the things that are happening, and much of the action is off the street in a way that it wasn't in Hanoi. This is the biggest city we've been in since Hanoi, so it's hard not to make comparisons! We are dropped off on a street with plenty of restaurants, and our driver points us down an alley towards our hostel. We are staying at a place called Bonjour Hostel. We make our way down the alley away from the action of the full street, but still with some people standing outside a couple other businesses. Our hostel is at the end, and we check in, go to our room, drop off our bags, and look for a place to eat. Turns out there is a restaurant with good ratings right across from when the Grab dropped us off, so we head back there. The restaurant is called Madam Thu Restaurant, and it has many different foods local to this area on the menu. We try a selection of dishes:

After dinner, we decide to do some exploring. We are staying close to a river that apparently has a busy riverwalk, so we walk over and along that for a bit. There are a lot of folks out, many of them young. Hue has a few colleges so we assume this is a place some of the college kids hang out. We walk by a big group of folks seated facing the riverwalk and realize they're someone sing karaoke. Their voice is really good and they're killing this performance, so we watch them sing the rest of the song before someone else comes up after them and sings an equally impressive song. Karaoke is a serious sport here. We walk a little bit farther to a bridge that's lit up, then decide that's a good place to turn around and head back to our hostel.

Thursday, April 10th - Some different kinds of old things

In the morning, we get up and have some coffee and breakfast at the hostel, eggs made to order and bread. Kaila asks for no bread, but I think the conversation gets a bit lost in translation so both our tomato and onion scrambled eggs end up coming with bread on our plates, but the owner of the hostel is the one who brings this to us and was very nice and remade Kaila's eggs (I ate the first round). Today we're going to the Hue Historic Citadel, which is within the walled Imperial City of Huế that acted as the imperial capital of Vietnam built in 1804 during the Nguyễn dynasty The citadel is known for its beautiful mosaics.

We realize one of the ways we can get to the citadel is by walking! One of the routes crosses the bridge we went to last night that we know has a pedestrian walkway and is right by a big cafe, so we decide to take that route. We get some coffee and cross the bridge, and right on the other side is a big open air market, called Dong Ba, busy with people (and motorbikes). Vendors sell lots of fruit, flowers, some packages goods, meat, and fish.

We continue the walk to the citadel along a park that lines the river, a road on the other side lined with beuilding across from us. We come across two separate kiosks selling pet fish on our side of the road, which seems like a funny thing to be selling from these freestanding structures.

We continue our walk and eventually come to an old mote of the citadel. We walk along it til we find a bridge over the mote to an entrance in the wall on the other side, but the entrance and bridge are hardly wdier than a car and there is somehow a steady stream of motorbikes, and even some cars, moving in both directions. We keep walking as we assume there must be a more tourist-friendly way into the walls.

We eventually find another bridge that has a narrow but raised pedestrian walkway on one side and carefully make our way across and into the citadel. There is a ticket counter near another wall, so we buy our tickets and make it into the citadel proper. This place is huge! We enter the imperial city near the citadel, so that is the first thing we check out, but there are plenty of other buildings and temples to see as well.

After the citadel, we got a Grab to a restaurant that Kaila found, called Lạc Thiện Restaurant. The place had good review on Find Me Gluten Free as well as Google, so it seemed like a good option. I got some grilled pork skewers that came with rice paper and veggies (including green figs and sliced banana flowers) for making spring rolls and Kaila ordered Bun Bo Hue, a local noodle soup of which the owner said she'd make a special bowl so Kaila could try it, explaining that many restaurants would only have a big batch that they would dole out to folks when they ordered (and which would often contain soy sauce that could posion Kaila). The food is really good and the owner, Loan, is sweet the whole time, chatting us up about the States and our time so far in Vietnam. At the end of the meal, she asks us where we we're going next and if we want to hire her brother to bring us out to an abandoned water park on the edge of town. This might have been a creepy offer if we didn't know this is a common tourist destination here, but the park was already on our radar as a thing to do today. Loan explains that her brother works for a taxi service like Grab, and shows us the price for a trip out there on the app that we could pay her brother directly and he'd wait for us while we explore the water park. Seems like a good bit of symbiosis since it would be cheaper for us then grabbing both ways, so we take them up on it! We say our goodbyes, sign the restaurant wall (there are signautres on the walls from people all over the world), then Loan gives us her "business card" as we leave with her brother in his turqoise electric taxi.

There's no fee for entering the abandonded water park, but there is a group of people out front asking for donations. We think they're trying to swindle tourists at first, so we go past them on the path to the park. About five minutes walking on this concrete path besides a manmade lake then we round a corner and see something surprising: a huge dragon-shaped building on an island in the middle of the lake. We had no idea this was waiting for us here! In another five or ten minutes of walking, we get to one of the bridges to the island, and cross over to go inside the building.

Once we see the building, it's pretty clear that it's in a state of heavy disrepair. Every wall is covered in grafiti, some simple tags but some pieces of art that would be better described as murals. We walk inside, and it starts to feel like a liminal space. It's not completely dark, as there are windows above letting light in, but it's dark in the corners. The walls are set at odd angles, and we feel directed towards an arched hallway in the center. There's something wrong with the doorway though -- As we approach it, a sense of non-belonging washes over us. This doesn't feel like something that should be found in a building. The doorway is lined with rough structures that are darker in color than the walls. Their shape is more organic than designed. At first I thought it might be some kind of fungus or mold and got a jolt of fear, maybe these organic shapes are some kind of sinister marker, like maybe this is a dangerous place we shouldn't be in. But my curiousity gets the best of me and I feel drawn into the archway...

As I walk through the archway, I realize the organic structures continue through the whole hallway, attached to struts that are regularly spaced. There are rooms branching off the hallway on either side, with similar blemished surfaces on the far walls. A closer look on the struts reveals a thin line of crystals along each one. The lines are broken glass. At one time, these were places where panes of glass came together. This detail is what finally puts this space together for me: an abandoned aquarium! Immediately this place is less sinister. It was a wild transformation that really hit home for me how something that is unknown is much scarier than something that has an explanation.

We continue walking through the abandoned aquarium, admiring the art people have added to the walls. Sometimes its simple tags, but there are also more intricate pieces on some of the walls. We go up a stairway stylized as a giant creature's rib cage and find a detailed portrait on one of the walls.

Just beside, there's a spiral staircase. We go up, and find ourselves in the dragon's mouth with a view looking out at the surrounding area. I had a sharpie, so we added our names to a wall and I made a few doodles. We didn't actually see any water slides, but were feeling satisfied with what we have seen so far, so we head back towards the car. We reflect on how clean the space was despite it's level of decay. There obviously must have been a lot of glass broken in the building at some point, but there was no broken glass on the floor and no trash at all. We realize people really must be keeping this place clean, so we decide to give the folks at the front a donation. The guy we spoke to confirmed that they have a big team of people that come in every day to clean out the area. We get back in the car, and Loan's brother drives us back to our hostel.

For dinner we go back to Madam Thu's, then we get some ice cream and take another walk around the city. We go into a huge store called "Go!" which has four floors, a cafeteria, and a movie theater. It feels like if Ikea was a grocery store and Korean instead of Swedish. It's pretty overwhelming, but we get some fruit and snacks then head back to the hostel.

Friday, April 11th -

More eggs and coffee for breakfast today then we checkout out of our hostel. This annoying-turned funny thing happened the other day where a hostel that Kaila booked through the HostelWorld app ended up having a glitch and didn't actually have a room available for us, which is when we ended up staying at Bonjour Hostel. The other hostel felt bad about this, so offered us a good price on one of their tours, if we wanted it. One of the options was a tour bus that would take us to a couple stops along the way to Đà Nẵng, including up a mountain pass called Hải Vân Pass. We had met a few people that had rented motorbikes to see the pass & they recommended seeing it somehow. The offered price of the tour was about the same as a standard bus and would let us get out to see the pass as well as some other places along the way (plus a tour guide and lunch), so it seemed like a good option. We booked it, and now someone comes by the hostel to pick us up.

We get on the tour bus and meet our guide. He tells us his name is Dan, and that his family is from Hue. He tells us a bit about the stops we'll make along the way, and we learn that the rest of the folks are taking this bus all the way to Hội An, which is a town an hour past Đà Nẵng. Dan pulls us aside and explains that the last stop of the tour, the Marble Mountains, is about 40 minutes past Đà Nẵng, so we have a couple options. We can either get dropped off by the bus early, or we can go along to the Marble Mountains and get our own ride back to Đà Nẵng after. He asks us to let him know our decision at the first stop. As we're driving, Dan is telling us all about Hue and Hội An and it comes up that there is going to be a new moon celebration in Hội An tonight where lanterns are lit and some of the electric lights in the town are turned off. We decided this sounds pretty nice, so Kaila reaches out to the Đà Nẵng hostel to see if we can push our reservation back a few days to go to Hội An first. They move our dates, and to Dan's suprise, we tell him we'll be joining all the way to Hội An!

Our first stop is a village called Thủy Thanh. Dan takes us out to a covered bridge that has mosaics in a similar style as the citadel. The bridge is lined with benches and has a small Buddhist shrine in the middle. Dan explains that the bridge is a gathering place for the town as a place of worship, to take refuge from the heat, and to socialize. So cool to see how infrastructure like this can be used as a third place!

We get some coffee in the village, then walk through a market and get back on the bus. As we drive to the next destination, Dan tells us about the rainy season in this part of Vietnam. This area gets about three meters of rain a year, with 165 rainy days. Dan jokes that the tour guides have to get creative with how they sell visiting the region during the rainy season: "We tell them it only rains two times a month here ... It's not our fault each of those times lasts 15 days!"

Our next stop is a big lagoon, part of the largest lagoon system in Vietnam. Growing oysters is common here! It's very cool to see all this calm water right in front of the mountains. We don't stop here for long, but it's enough to get out & walk out to the water for a bit.

About an hour more of driving up a twisty road then we get to the top of Hải Vân Pass. Dan tells us that the name essentially means "sea meets clouds" in Vietnamese, or more literally "ocean cloud pass". There are some old guard posts up here that we got out and walked around while taking in the views back towards Hue and out toward Đà Nẵng.

When we get back on the bus, Dan asks us for our lunch prefences. The options are either a peanut butter sandwich or a pork bahn mi. I choose the bahn mi. We see Dan make a call, but I don't think any of us really expect how we will be getting these sandwiches because as we roll into Đà Nẵng, the whole bus is visibly surprised when the bus slows down, the driver opens the door, and someone starts running alongside the bus to hand Dan the bag of sandwiches! Very impressive, especially considering neither party that participated in this expertly-executed hand-off party seemed to bat an eye at this exchange, making me think this is a pretty routine order of business. The bahn mi was good too!

After we drive through Đà Nẵng, our next stop is in the Marble Mountains, which are a cluster of limestone and marble hills. The place we are stopping is another temple complex containing some different Buddhist shrines. I've never really put this together until now, but marble is just the metamorphized version of limestone, so it makes sense that a region with a lot of old limestone would also have some regions with marble. Because of this, there are a bunch of vendors selling marble statues as we walk into the Marble Mountain park. We walk up a bunch of stairs and see some pagodas and Buddha statues, including some that are places in caves throughout the mountain. My favorite shrine was a big Buddha statue in a cave that had a sort of natural skylight letting light inside in a pretty way.

After heading back down the stairs, we get back on the bus and continue to Hội An, our last stop. As we are driving through some of the farmland separating these towns, we continue to notice some flag type things flying off of posts planted seemingly randomly but also frequently through many of the fields. We have been seeing these flags pretty consistently throughout Vietnam, but haven't had a tour guide along with us on our drives, until now! We ask Dan, and he says they're "puppets to terrify the birds," which is a hilarious way to describe scarecrows! Shortly after this exchange, we arrive in Hội An and the bus starts dropping folks at their hotels.

Thanks for reading!