Hue Citadel

We weren't really sure why we were in Hue. Hoi An had been wonderful and relaxed, Danang had been darker, more sinister and not so welcoming though certainly in the midst of changes and hoping to go places as a tourist resort in the future. Hue was north again, further from home and we knew little about it. Our hotel, the Saigon Morin, was a big old French colonial building of over a hundred years - palatial but tired. The town was vibrant and busy and it was easy to find a good restaurant nearby. Our hotel overlooked the Perfume River (the Song Huong) and the Citadel beyond, and this was our first visit of the day. Tiung, our guide who had accompanied us from Hoi An, collected us from the hotel and took us to the entrance by minibus. The Imperial Citadel was magnificent and is gradually being restored after the ravages of the various wars it has witnessed in the past century. Inside the walls and moat are the Imperial City and within that, the Forbidden Purple City where the Nguyen emperors lived. The restoration work goes on quietly in the background, and we wandered around in a very relaxed way between the rubble, the ruins and the meticulously restored Pagodas, temples and royal residences.
Later, we visited the Pagoda (Buddhist temple) from which a young monk travelled to Saigon to burn himself to death as a protest to governmental Buddhist persecution. The Oxford Cambridge car he used to travel to Saigon is still preserved at the pagoda.
We returned to the centre of Hue via a Dragon Boat ride down the Perfume river (more silk was bought from the enterprising wife of the boat owner) and had a lovely Vietnamese lunch in a good restaurant before finishing the day with a visit to the tomb of one of the emperors and a visit to a conical hat makers workshop. We seem to pack a lot in to each day but it is always done in a relaxed fashion and we have been amazed by how much we have seen and how quickly time passes. Roll on tomorrow when the pace of life is likely to quicken further as we head south to Saigon/Ho Chi Min City.