Day 6 -- Hue
Any day that starts on a dragon boat is a good day. We motored gently down the Perfume River past every cliched Vietnam vignette you’ve ever seen in an establishing shot: people washing clothes on the river bank, ladies in bright jackets and conical hats paddling sampans, swaying palm trees, water buffalo in rice paddies, pagodas, temples, other dragon boats. The shyly friendly couple captaining the boat had a chubby baby in a little hanging basket in the pilot house and when the lady of the ship displayed a wide array of pop-up paper dragon boats we really couldn’t resist buying a few. The hour long trip was also a chance for Tuan to share wedding pictures and photos of his absurdly darling daughter.
The boat dropped us at Thien Mu Pagoda (or the Pagoda of the Celestial Lady), a beautiful, serene spot whose seven-story pagoda is considered an emblem of the city of Hue. It’s an old place, originally built at the turn of the 17th century. A more recent claim to fame is that it now houses the car (a blue Austin) driven to Saigon by Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who immolated himself in protest of Catholic oppression in 1963. It’s also home to the most impressive bonsai garden we’ve ever seen, a magnificent bronze bell cast locally in 1710, and a community of actual monks, who go about their business without taking any note of the visitors wandering around their home.
Tuan is a former monk, as were all of our subsequent guides. The Buddhist monasteries educate a lot of boys in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Tuan gave us some interesting insight into the forms of Buddhism practiced in Vietnam that I’m not even going to try and explain. Speaking only for myself, I started this trip utterly ignorant of the histories and nuances of Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. I spent the entire trip visiting important sites for these religions, hearing adherents talk about them, touring museums, earnestly reading information boards, paging through guidebooks and generally paying attention. I ended the trip with a lot more multisyllabic words in my vocabulary, a lot more insane creation myths explored, a lot of symbolism cataloged … and still utterly ignorant.
The one concrete bit of spiritual practice I did manage to grok was the feng shui of pagodas and tombs. Once it was pointed out, it was easy to spot: There will be a mountain or hill behind (to create security and a comfortable place to lean). There will be water in front, even if that requires digging a moat. There will be two hills or eminences of some kind symbolizing two sentinels: a dragon on the left and a lion on the right. And at the entrance there will be a screen to keep out the bad spirits -- this can take the form of a big stand-alone wall or natural feature like another hill in the distance. In sacred place after sacred place, we recognized this pattern of features.
Onward! Tuan the Driver picked us up and we headed back to Hue to the Imperial City. This is a walled compound within the larger citadel of Hue. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s absolutely overwhelming. Huge edifices covered in mosaics and carvings, ornate roofs, endless plazas lined with mammoth cast bronze urns, a immense temple with alters to each of the Nguyen emperors (each displaying a gilt framed photograph, fresh fruit and flowers and burning incense), a throne room that looked like it could hold a thousand people with a gilded wooden throne in the center, endless covered walkways with elaborate carved columns, a man made lagoon with a man made island in the middle of it complete with a pavilion where the emperor could entertain his hundreds of concubines. It’s unbelievably lavish, yet utterly without creature comfort. It’s designed to create awe, and it does. But it’s weirdly unlovely. My favorite thing in the entire magnificent place was a tiny detail: in the walls of one of the many (many) spectacular buildings were mosaic flowers whose petals were made from little scallop shells.
We made a brief stop at the Museum of Royal Antiquities, where my perception that the emperors spent their days looking good rather than feeling good was reinforced -- magnificent coats that looked itchy and stiff, over-carved mahogany furniture with too many right angles for a human butt to enjoy, massive cutlery that would have made mealtimes into weightlifting sessions.
And speaking of mealtimes, when’s lunch? We departed the citadel and made for Tuan’s recommended pho joint (not the pho joint Anthony Bourdain visited, which Tuan says isn’t as good). All these little local places are completely open to the street with long tables, plastic chairs, and basically one thing on the menu: in this case, big bowls of rich broth, rice noodles, a crab meatball, sliced pork, bean sprouts, and fresh greens to add as you like. We also tried several desserts -- coconut jello, little sticky things that I don’t know what they were, and sweet red bean paste cakes wrapped in tea leaves. Let’s just say you don’t go to Vietnam for the dessert.
Fortified, we headed for our last stop of the day, the Khai Dinh Mausoleum. At first blush, this place looks absolutely medieval -- a massive staircase of blackened stone rakes steeply up to a pair of elaborate temples set one atop the other. Obelisks, immense snakes with weird black glass eyes and carved warrior-bodyguards line the steps in a gothic nightmare of more-is-more-ism. And the exterior ain’t the half of it. The tomb itself is a massive room with a bigger than life-sized gilded statue of the Emperor Khai Dinh as its centerpiece, set under an enormous decorative canopy. Every inch of the room that isn’t covered in glass and porcelain mosaic is gilded. And the porcelain in the mosaics (according to Tuan) is broken pieces of very expensive vases and dishes imported from France. It is the most vulgar, over-the-top, appalling and yet utterly compelling thing I’ve ever seen.
The interesting thing is it’s not old. Khai Dinh started construction on this overwrought memorial to himself in 1920, raising taxes by 30% in order to pay for it. It took eleven years to finish. And this for a guy the Vietnamese apparently considered a contemptible puppet of the colonial occupiers. All the place needed was a Robin Bell projection across the front saying “He fucked the French.”
Tuan and Tuan dropped us back at La Residence where more spa time and naps refreshed us before drinks at the hotel bar and then an excursion into the neighborhoods of Hue for dinner at Hanh Restaurant. This was another local place, though about four times the size of our lunch spot, and it was humming. A six course dinner was $6.00 and beers were 75 cents apiece which made this a magnet for locals and slightly more adventurous tourists. The food was good, but the highlight of the meal was our host, a manic guy with tremendous passion for the food he was serving and a willingness to literally leap across the room to provide instructions on how to eat it.
The first course was little cups of a thick rice custard topped with shredded crab and chopped peanuts. We were instructed to add generous lashings of fish sauce and eat them like oysters. Strange but delicious. Next up those same little ground pork kebabs with peanut sauce and rice paper. Then the crispy pancake. I picked mine up (it was next to impossible to eat with chopsticks) and earned one of those dazzlings leaps to the table when our host spotted me and barked “It’s not a taco! It’s not a taco!” He showed us how to break up the pancake and add peanut sauce. Then fresh rolls with shrimp, crispy rolls and finally a dessert we all turned down having been unable to finish our $6 meals. Easy to fight over the tab when dinner for five -- with beers -- is under $40.
