Half Hue home

Hue, Vietnam

 

So I've recovered a bit from the Ha Long Bay caper and spent a few days back in Hanoi in expat hangouts comiserating.  I met some fairly interesting folks - generally the expats are more interesting to talk to than the fellow travelers (with the exception of a kilt wearing scotsman I ran into on saturday), at least for me, and my tale of from the concrete jungle to the real jungle arouses a bit more interest than the standard backpacker lonely planet "I just graduated college..." BS song and dance.  Included among them were old vietnam hands (again, predominantly aussie, one of whom, for some reason, explained to me that he "know exactly what [my] problem is.  You don't know who you are! I can tell it just by looking at you! You don't even know who you are!"  That may have been a fair assessment, but my real problem is that there are too many loudmouth wallabies every single damned place I go.) and even a few random russians left over from way back when.  Regarding the others, many of them, even the long termers, shared the same feeling of tiredness of having to remain guarded a bit more here than in some other spots in SE Asia.  On that front, later that night as I was cruising home a moto-hooker...sorry, I mean "masseur" (I must have looked really stressed) who was peddling her wares found time to pick my pocket while I was walking down the street.  On the plus side, I figured it out after a few seconds and simply turned around and said "give me my fucking wallet back", and she handed it over with no fuss- of course it wasn't till later till I figured out the cash I had inside (not more than 20 US$) was gone, but that seemed like a small price to pay for not losing my credit, atm cards, etc, and for whatever reason that wasn't as upsetting as when I've gotten cheated and robbed before.

Today I'm in Hue, which was the imperial capital of Vietnam during the 19th c, and features your standard, heavily chinese influenced forbidden city/palace type citadel.  It's nice enough, and the restored parts are well done, though a lot of it has been destroyed in various fires and wars (the siege of Hue was a major battle of the Tet offensive in 1968, memorably depicted at the end of the movie Full Metal Jacket). Accordingly much of it is just ruins in overgrown fields and crumbling walls pockmarked with bullet holes, which gives it a spooky quality, though not as disquieting as the woman's shoe store/internet cafe I'm in right this second.    After this, it's Da Nang, Hoi An, then Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and off to Cambodia, which will be a bit of a relief.