Motorbike Sir?

The past few days I have been exploring the sights and sounds of Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam. The city is not too big and the traffic is a bit more managable than Hanoi though there isn’t much to do outside of sightseeing.

The first day I checked out the Citadel – the old, fortified part of Hue accross the river. Inside the Citadel is the Forbidden Purple City – modeled after the forbidden city in Bejing. Unfortunatly, the French and American wars in Vietnam destroyed much of the ancient complex, leaving only a fraction of the once magnificent palace intact. I often enjoy visiting ancient sights that are not in the best physical shape. Ruins easily give away their age, forcing the visitor to use their imagination to reconstruct the place. Given the amount of destruction the citadel saw, I was a bit concerned about UXO (UnExploded Ordinance) and Landmines, watching carefully where I stepped, but I then realized that the Citadel saw thousands of visitors every month and that it was probably pretty safe.

The next day I signed up for a tour of the DMZ (De-Militarized Zone), which is a bit north of Hue. The tour promised a fair number of famous sights from the Vietnam war and I was very curious to see what it would deliver. We first visited the line of demarcation, the Ben Hai River. The Vietnamese have reconstructed the bridge that existed here before the war and put up an independence monument, but there really wasn’t very much to the place. Our next stop was the Vinh Moc tunnel complex, where communities living in the DMZ dug tunnels in which to live in order to escape American artillery and bomb raids. Most of the tunnels are still intact, and range between 10 and 30 meters underground with all the essential facilities, including hospitals, maternity wards, wells, and bomb shelters. At one time the tunnels housed 700 people. The tunnels are a bit cramped – I managed to hit my head on the ceiling a few times. All in all it was very interesting.

After the tunnels we hopped back on the bus and headed westward to check out some famous battle sights. Our first stop was the rockpile, a steep mountain where US Special Forces created what they thought was an unassailable helocopter landing pad. I think it was a pretty good lookout point until it was overrun by NVA commandos.

We then headed up into the mountians towards Laos for a visit to Khe Sahn base. Our guide was fairly knowledgable about the subject and gave us a rundown. The base had an airstrip and a fair number of men though this too was eventually overrun by the NVA. While we were there, a large group of NVA veterans showed up to tour the site. They were very excited and insisted that we pose for photos with them. I gathered through hand signals that they had all taken part in the battle; this one veteran was explaining that he shot down a US helicopter. They all seemed very proud of themselves and broke into a few old war songs with much hoopla and excitement.

The next day I hooked up with a pair of Belgian mathmaticians and an Israeli girl and checked out some impressive tombs in the area (on motorbikes of course). The two we saw were huge, with massive waterlilly-covered ponds, temples, and even seperate tombs for the emperor’s concubines. They were both very serene and well designed resting places. In the process of getting from one tomb to the other, we drove down this ‘road’ and came accross a bamboo bridge. We had to pay this local Vietnamese woman a few dollars to drive accross it. As I drove across I was sure the bridge was about to collapse.

We also visited the Thien Mu Pagoda, a monestary just outside the city. In 1963, a monk from the monestary by the name of Thich Quang Duc went to Saigon and self-immolated himself (you have probably seen the picture before, it is also the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s first album). The Pagoda has the Austin motorcar which transported Thich Duc to Saigon on display.

We had had enough sightseeing for one day, so we headed to the beach. There were not many foriegners there, though we were constantly bombarded with Vietnamese children trying to sell us everything from fruit to soccer balls. At least the water was a nice emerald green with some decent waves perfect for body surfing. I had not been in the ocean since Koh Tao in Thailand and the warm salty water was pure ecstacy.

I am now down in Hoi An, a small old town renouned for its tailors and ancient buildings. Tonight I had some excellent fish (I think it was Swordfish) sauteed in tomatos on top of rice. Total cost with drink: $2.

Neil

Tags: Vietnam

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2004 at 9:48 am and is filed under Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.