(What is it with Vietnam and the letter H? It feels like every city has to begin with an H: Ho Chi Minh, Hoi An, Hue, Hanoi - you’d think they could have been a little more creative)
Hue was just a short (4 hour) bus ride from Hoi An, so it meant no overnight bus - yay! Although we did have a slight panic when the boys didn’t appear for the bus until Rox hammered on their door to wake them…..
All the partying of the previous week in Nha Trang and Hoi An caught the others up, so they headed off for a nap whilst I headed off to explore the old city. Hue is known as the most cultured city in Vietnam - it has 5 universities, and was once the Imperial capital. For some reason, I’d had it in my head that it would be a place along the lines of Hoi An
It wasn’t.
Hue is actually Vietnam’s 5th biggest city, and has the noise & traffic to match. I headed off to the Citadel, checking out all the new year preparations on the way - huge festivities were being planned and it was great to see stages being set up, and fireworks being prepared.
The Citadel was pretty ruined - Hue suffered huge amounts of damage during the American War, with the city ending up lying in ruins after the Tet Offensive in 1968, so it’s amazing that the Citadel is as intact as it is. The Old city was the home of the Vietnamese Emperors and there is a display of old costumes inside that were absolutely beautiful.
Later that afternoon, Ollie & I went on a mission to try and book onto a trip to see the old American War sites and to book up our next, and final, overnight bus.
On our way back, we were invited to join some Vietnamese people for a beer and some food to help them celebrate New Year - it’s tradition on the last working day of the year for workers to share a meal together, and these guys invited us to join them - sitting on a plastic stool on the street, drinking beer with ice and eating chicken and rice with people who just wanted us to help them celebrate will be one of my favourite memories of Vietnam I think - they taught us to shout Happy New Year in Vietnamese: Chuc Mung Nam Moi!
Next day we went on our trip around the De-Militarised Zone (DMZ). If anything was ever misnamed, this was it.
After the division of Vietnam into North & South in the late 1940s, the demilitarised zone was set up to prevent tensions between the two nations.
It became perhaps the most bombed & napalmed territory in the whole of Vietnam.
The tour itself was a long day, but as I’d been reading something of the history of the war in an effort to understand the country more, I was interested to see some of the sites. We saw the start of the Ho Chi Minh Trail - the 13,000 km network of roads & tracks that enabled the Vietcong to move artillery and personnel down the country (contrary to my belief, the trail wasn’t a single track, but a huge network of paths, trails and carefully concealed caves - bridges were built of bamboo & sunk each night to avoid detection, tree branches were tied together to hide roads - a phenomenal achievement - they even laid an oil pipeline down there)
We also saw one of the US ’Firebases’ - a hill in the middle of mainly flat land, where the US Army created a camp on top & sent helicopters out on reconnaissance & bombing missions - a recognisable feature of many Vietnam War Movies. Obviously we accompanied this with the Stones' "Gimme Shelter".
On our journey, we passed through rice fields with enormous ‘ponds’ - B52 bomb craters that farmers have turned into fish ponds. There’s still a huge amount of unexploded ordinance within Vietnam, so it’s important not to stray off the beaten track.
We also went to the site of the battle of Khe Sanh - one of the major turning points in the war - it’s a desolate plateau, where 5000 American Marines were surrounded by 30,000 Vietcong, and the ensuing siege lasted over 90 days. It was somewhat sobering to see a place where so many lost their lives.
Equally awe-inspiring was the Vinh Minh tunnels - a series of tunnels, like the Cu Chi tunnels in Saigon, designed to hide Vietnamese from American attack. The difference in these tunnels was that it was civilians who lived in here - 13 km of tunnels were built on varying levels - there were maternity units in there - babies who were born there didn’t live outside for 6 years, and saw sunlight for a carefully guarded 1 hour per day.
Amazing what the human spirit can achieve.
Hue saw the end of our run of good weather - we toured the DMZ in the rain, and once we hit Hanoi……
……it was FREEZING!!!
Hanoi is supposed to be about 20 degrees in January, but it can be heavily effected by freezing cold winds coming down from China, so it ended up being 12 degrees (Now I know that this is nothing compared to the snows & -5 degree temperatures being experienced in the UK, but we HAD just come from 30 degree heat, and I had NO warm clothes, so I deserve a shred of sympathy, surely?)
Ben & I were thoroughly miserable with the cold - I attempted an emergency shop for some warm clothes, but we came up against Tet - the Vietnamese New Year meant that EVERYTHING closed down for 5 whole days. It did make life pretty difficult.
I don’t feel I got to know Hanoi well at all - the heart of a city is different when everything shuts down, so I never really got a feel for the place.
Whilst in Hanoi, we took an overnight trip to Halong Bay - one of the UNESCO natural wonders - it’s a bay full of 1,969 rock formations - huge limestone cliffs, and is pretty awe inspiring. Local legend has it that a local dragon got angry one day and spat fire into the sea - where the fire drops landed, the islands were created.
Halong Bay was certainly beautiful, but for me, the cold affected my enjoyment of it which was disappointing.
Hanoi also saw the first break up of our group, and I think that also affected my mood - on the 28th, Roxane left for Singapore, and Ben left for the overnight bus to Vientiane in Laos. Ollie and I were staying behind for a quick jaunt up into the hills. After a month of travelling together, and being in each others’ company for about 15 hours a day, it was really hard to say goodbye.
Roxane and I celebrated her birthday a few days early by treating ourselves to lunch at a great French Bistro (Steak! Blue Cheese! Wine! Imagine THAT!) while the boys went to the Snake Farm to drink blood and bile and other such vile things.
Our last night as a foursome wasn’t really spent as a unit - Rox and I managed to get separated from the boys and spent most of the evening with some people we’d met on the Halong Bay boat. After some frantic texting and chasing around Hanoi, we eventually managed to meet up with the boys for a final photo. Ahhhh.
