Huế, Vietnam
Sites: Dục Đức Temple, Gia Long Temple, Minh Mạng Temple, Khải Định Temple, Tự Đức Temple, Imperial Palace, "Abandoned" water park
2024-11-09
Away from the pollution of a wintry Hanoi, Hue in central Vietnam offers clean air and blue skies. When it's not raining.
When it's not, we go sightseeing.
Hue is the site of the Nguyen Dynasty which reigned in the 19th century up until World War II. There are various tombs dedicated to each emperor scattered witin 20 kilometres of the main city. I forgot whose is whose, in part because they all blend in after a while, but also because some emperors had a remarkably short reign (one was only three or four days). The mausoleums below, in pictures -- and notice how the architecture changes as the French invade.
At night, we ate around the Imperial Palace. It's buzzing there with young and old people; a nice cross-section.
The next sunny day, we venture out into the Imperial Palace. Not as big as the one Beijing, but still sizeable. Takes about four hours to stroll around the entire grounds, just admiring the curation. Many parts of it are still under construction, but the newly refurbished parts are stunning.
Another strange site in Hue is the abandoned water park. Except for the fact that it's not abandoned. When Thorin was last year, he said you had to bribe a guard to bring the scooter in on a broken dirt path into the waterpark. The dirty path circumnavigated a lake, and not all parts of the park were easily accessible through this broken road. However when we went, they had paved that entire road, but left the theme park structures mostly untouched. Inside the structures, the grounds were cleared to make way for tourists
Strange, our fascination with abandoned things. Maybe a peek into the past? Anyhow, this was only built in 2000 and hardly warrants for abandoned. Still, the formalisation of entry is amusing and antithetical abandon-ness. But in the developing world, if there is a dime to be made somewhere, it'll be made.
Overall, a chill city. There are a lot of French tourists here, but other parts of the world haven't seem to have caught up with the historical importance of the city. And like every Vietnamese city, their coffee game is strong. We stayed near Lam Cafe, an establishment run by young folks with a chilled out loitering space. We ended up coming here a lot.
