Hue
The former capital of imperial Vietnam. A slow paced cosmopolitan city. We like it very much even though we only spent a few days there. We got very little (like NONE) sleep on the night bus, so when we arrived we were tired and grumpy (OK, I was. Erica is a morning person and can remain amazingly chipper) and just wanted some breakfast and a nap. When we woke we walked to the imperial palace, aka forbidden city, aka Purple Palace, aka place America bombed to little bits of brick about thirty years ago. It was built in the 1870s and modeled after the Forbidden City in Beijing. They got it done just in time to be colonized by the French. It is kinda like the one in China; only much smaller. We walked around it all in about two hours. It was pretty impressve though. Many parts of it are just foundation and rubble which was neat in its own right. Some day I will put up pictures.
The next day we took a tour of the DMZ from the American War. The remains of the war are scattered everywhere here…as you would guess. People are very friendly and go out of their way to tell us they like Americans, but sometimes it feels a bit wierd to see old tanks and helipcoters in musuems. Pillboxs still overlook most of the bridges along highway 1 in the south and many tour operators still use old USMC jeeps too. The most interesting part of the DMZ tour was the tunnels. They are very impressive. Some of them went 90 feet underground. All dung by hand and all have withstood relentless carpet bombing. Craters dot the country side in this area. Some enterprising farmers have turned them into ponds. The last stop was at Khe San were the marines were held under seige just before the Tet Offensive. The site itself was unremarkable…..everything had been carted away long ago. There was a guy walking around with a cardboard box of dog tags that he said he found with his metal detector though. Seeing all those names in that box and knowing that most of them probably never made it home was sad.
Tags: Travel
