After our long overnight train we were all a bit knackered. Everyone in our group is really nice and enjoys trying the local food and snacks, except for one Dutch guy who seems to exclusively eat fried chicken and that’s about it. He was super grumpy and has previously been quite difficult (at one point not bringing an overnight bag onto the boat trip, even though we had been told to do so several times and he took it out on our guide). So in an attempt to please him, we ended up at an Italian restaurant for lunch. The rest of us chose from their small ‘local food’ section and he got a chicken burger he moaned was not the same as home.
So it was fair to say we were all a bit tired and grumpy and not super excited to spend the afternoon walking around the imperial city. But even in the worst mood it was still amazing! It is a huge complex built for the royalty and had areas for absolutely everyone to stay. The king’s mother’s house, the king’s grandmother’s house, the king’s mistresses house, the king’s doctors house. So you can imagine how huge the place was. Lots of the buildings had been damaged after the war, you could still see bullet holes in a lot of the buildings and artifacts, so they were in the process of renovating them. But it seems a complete travesty that instead of repairing them they just knock them down and start again, building it in the same style. Although, not always in the same materials, we saw many concrete posts painted to look like the traditional wood beams.
We also learnt a lot about the royal families, traditionally the king would have one wife but hundreds of concubines (mistresses). These would be daughters of government officials and scholars who would offer up their daughters in tribute and it was considered rude of the king to refuse so he accepted hundreds of them. Most never even met the king, but could see no other man for the rest of their lives. Once the king died they still had to remain in the imperial city as widows until they died, unless they had had a child by the king, in which case they were given land and riches to raise the child. So a lot of the women wanted to meet the king and get pregnant.
To make sure the women would only have children by the king they saw no men apart from eunuch servants. Our gide seemed under the impression this was because if a man looses their testicals they instantly become gay. None of us quite knew what to say about this so we let him continue his tour, slightly worried about the accuracy of it after that. Apparently any man seen even near the wives was sentenced to death. People sentenced to death were given several options, being boiled in hot oil, a fight to the death against a tiger, poison or hanging. I doubt there were many takers for the first two!
For dinner we visited a local families home, where they cooked us dinner. We were worried there wouldn’t be room to fit us all in but we found out Vietnamese families often live several generations in the same house so their table was big enough after all. We were treated to various tasty dishes, pork and tofu soup, crispy jackfruit and crackers, deep-fried aubogine in soy sauce, lemon fish etc and some also not to our taste such as a parcel of sticky rice paste.
The family had lots of little children running around all keen to look at us and say hello. They seemed fascinated by my blue eyes and I nearly had them poked by little fingers a few times.
After dinner the younger ones of us in the group decided to go to a bar that K recommended. The owner was overjoyed to see us, telling us we were the first white people he had seen here since Covid and giving us lots of free shots, including one which was tequila and vodka mixed and poured over one glass and into a second and then the first glass was set on fine and we were given a straw to drink out of the second. Honestly, it’s a miracle we all managed to escape with our eyebrows intact! We all also shared an apple flavoured sheesha they gave us. I think the bar was hoping if they got us started we would stay and buy lots of drinks but as we were all knackered we ended up heading home around midnight.
On our second day in Hue we went on a motorbike tour. Just driving around Vietnamese traffic in a motorbike was an experience in itself. There is no priority late or right of way, everyone goes in every direction and all at once. Bikes just weave their way through the chaos with a liberal amount of honking. But we were all assigned a bike and a driver and set off through the city and into the countryside.
I wish I had taken more photos in the countryside but at first I wasn’t confident to get my phone out while riding. But there were so many people out tending to their rice fields in the traditional weaved cone hats. It was a beautiful sight. There were also a lot of people drying their rice on the road that the bikes had to weave around.
Our first stop was a duck farm where they keep the ducks for eggs and later for food. They let them graze on the already harvested rice fields fishing any rice that has been dropped out of the water. Our second stop was to see one of the ancestor buildings.
Vietnam is 90% non-religious, but they still have quite spiritual beliefs and one of those is that you should make tributes to your ancestors. So they build large elaborate buildings dedicated to their ancestors that they will visit on New year’s. For the rest of the time it remains empty, there are no bodies or ashes in there just a building in their honour. K told us it’s becoming quite an issue especially in cities where there is a limited amount of space and just as many houses for the dead as there are for the living.
Our next stop was one of the three covered bridges laft in Vietnam. The used to be a big part of communities here as people would gather on the bridge and socialise due to it having a good breeze on the river and shade. Now days it was just full of hundreds of primary school children in their cone hats all wanting to say hello, it was an adorable sight.
Near the bridge there was a market that we walked around. The fish here were so fresh they were still flapping about on the tray, we also saw a woman selling baby ducklings to raise for eggs (or so we hope!) and obviously all had to pet them.
Next we visited an inscense making town. There are many beautiful reeds painted different colours and once you have chosen a colour you like you can choose a scent and they will roll the reed in a paste with the scent mixed in. We all got to have a go creating our own and mine looked more like a hotdog on a stick than incense!
Our last stop was to the 4th king’s burial complex, again like a minni city, he actually lived in it for 14 years before he was buried there. It had a boating lake with a little island they would release animals of for the king to hunt. We also saw the supposed tomb of the king himself, however during the colonisation the French dug up the king’s tomb in the attempt to steal any gold he was buried with, only to find that it was empty and the king had been buried somewhere else is a secret location, probably to prevent such grave robing acts. The Vietnamese government believes he is still buried somewhere in the complex but refuses to do a geological scan as they believe the king should be left in peace.
In the evening a few of us decided to do a cooking course. We all had to choose one menu to do and as one of our group, Rema, is currently vegan for religious reasons we picked one of the two vegan options making fresh vegetable spring rolls, soy sauce egg plant and tofu noodles. They also had an option to learn how to cut vegetables into fancy patterns for $2 extra so we opted in for that too, how hard could it be?
It turns out really bloody hard. We had to do three designs a flower made from a tomato, a heart leaf design from a cucumber and another flower made from a carrot. The designs themselves were hard to do but we also had a terrible translator, the chef would spend 2/3 minutes talking and indicating different cuts and directions and the translator would wait for her to finish and then say ‘she say cut it’. So we had to just do our best, which by the chef’s reaction was not good enough. After I messed up my second attempt of the tomato she almost threw the third one at me. Although I had a weird talent for the cucumber leaves, I think it may be my new calling. Everyone was struggling so I made enough for the whole group and slyly passed them around to avoid the chef’s disappointment. The carrots were an absolute disaster we couldn’t get all the way around without breaking the peel so ended up with petals instead of flowers. After a solid hour and a half the chef (and us) had had enough and decided we didn’t need carrot flowers, we were done.
The rest of the class continued in the same fashion with bad translations and us not really knowing what was going on, trying our best and it mostly being wrong until the chef just took over and we ended up watching her. So I can’t say I learned a lot about Vietnamese cooking except it involves a LOT of sugar. And also that they don’t seem to know what vegan is using fish and oyster sauce and egg noodles. So poor Rema spent four hours cooking only to end up hungry. Although after tasting the food she may have had a lucky escape… No honestly it wasn’t that bad just very average. It was a fun afternoon but not because of the cooking more us taking the piss out of eachothers tragic attempts to cut and guess the instructions to varying degrees of success.
After the course I went to pack only to find the hotel laundry had died all of my white tops a milkey Green and had added so red splodges for extra decoration so, all in all, not the most fun afternoon!
Tomorrow we get the bus to Hoi An, I will let you know all about it soon. Lots of love, Alice.