A distinctive Hue

I think the Vietnamese have stolen all the accents from the English language - the e of Hue has both a circumflex and an acute accent, which seems greedy. Anyway, all you need to know is that (a) it's pronounced Hugh-way, and (b) I'm too lazy to find a way to add the accents.
Hue is probably the first place in Vietnam where we've found historical buildings that you would travel to see in their own right. On our first evening we had a stroll around the main tourist concentration, which is small and has a few decent bars and restaurants but is otherwise unimpressive, so first impressions were lacklustre. The next couple of days changed our minds.

Hue is the home of emperors, the old capital of Vietnam (Nguyen Dynasty 1802-1945. Yes, I looked that up). It sits astride the broad Perfume River (our view of which was the best thing about our hotel, above), and on the north side is the vast Imperial City, and within that is the still large Imperial Citadel, which contains in turn the Purple Forbidden City - or would if there was much left of it (all sides agree that the Viet Cong did actually use it as a base and were holed up there for quite a while, so it's good that there's anything left). A lot of work is being done to restore and, in some cases, rebuild this site - what we saw in progress looked very impressive work.

I try not to comment on the many manglings of the English language and spelling mistakes we see on our travels - it's rarely worse than the e-mails I get from some of you (you know who you are) - but one really threw us. At the Imperial Palace there is a very impressive and professional video featuring computer-generated reconstructions of some of the old buildings. One line of it made no sense until we walked round the complex and saw a gutter-spout in the shape of a large fish. Oh, we said - they have carp gutters!

Quite a lot of the Citadel still stands and it's well worth the visit. The Imperial City generally has a pleasant, relaxed air to it with a lot of gardens - but it's so big that there's plenty of commerce too.

We also had our Christmas lunch here. The only place we saw offering anything Christmassy on Christmas Day itself was the hostel up the road from our hotel. Instead we had a crazy seven course lunch in a charming building with beautiful gardens. It may have been a little too high concept - the closest we got to a traditional Christmas bird was a "peacock" - a whole pineapple, hollowed out and filled with candles, with carved carrot wings and head, a red hot chili for a nose and mini porks spring rolls for plumage. Hmm...

Around Hue you can find various recommended buildings, notably the tombs of some of the Nguyen emperors. As usual, you can't even leave your hotel or eat lunch, let alone walk 50 yards, without being offered tours. For once we passed on the cheap minibus trips in favour of riding on the back of a couple of motorbikes on a customised itinerary, for an extravagant $9 each, and one of the drivers was a pretty good guide (can recommend the Stop & Go Cafe for this if you too are prepared to break the bank). Purely so I can remember which order my photos are in, I'd better make a note here that we went to the Thien Mu Pagoda*, the ampitheatre built for elephant/tiger fights**, Tomb of Tu Duc***, Vong Canh Hill (stunning views of the river outside town, below), Tomb of Khai Dinh, and Tomb of Minh Mang.

* And adjoining monastery. 75% of Vietnam is Buddhist and we reckon there must be about a million monks, including a lot of kids who are monks in training but go out to normal schools - you can recognise them by their partially shaven heads. There aren't enough schools so most kids only go for half a day, and you generally have to pay for schooling (though there are exceptions, as we found out later in Ha Long Bay). The monks' only income is donations of money, produce and people's time (eg people will help to repaint the monasteries). They must be jealous of the Church of England and its lands - if Buddhist monks are allowed to be jealous.

** Fights were previously held in the Palace courtyard with guards forming a ring of swords and spears, and when that (predictably) went wrong, on an island in the Perfume River with boats for spectators. Hold on, can't tigers swim? Yes they can, so that went wrong too, and apparently the emperor had to fight off a tiger with an oar, which sounds highly unlikely. So they moved out of town. It was fixed though, elephants being an important animal over here - the tigers were declawed and partially detoothed, so they generally ended up getting stomped. Poor kitty. Not actually much worth seeing here, but a good story (at least until I retold it).

*** Some of the emperors oversaw construction of their own tombs. This chap's was based around a tiny island in a lake, a really charming spot. Apparently he had over 100 wives but couldn't produce an heir, though he did adopt a son who succeeded him before dying aged 15. Tu Duc therefore had to write his own eulogy, which is rather long and sad - though I imagine it was some other poor fellow's job to carve the entire thing onto a gigantic stele balanced on a turtle's back - and as he got older he would come more and more often to the place he was going to be buried. Lovely place though - all three tombs we saw were well worth the trip, I wish we'd noticed there were a couple of "lesser" ones on the way back so we could have popped in for a look.

Tomb of Khai Dinh (guess ­what the carefully cropped sign at the bottom of the second one says...):

Tomb of Minh Mang:

We finished up by hiring a dragon boat (less exciting than you're probably picturing) for an hour's cruise on the Perfume River.

We assumed the local girl on board was just there with her dad the driver, but as soon as we set off she started unpacking things to try to sell us, and brought them out of the cabin one at a time.

No thank you, we don't want any shirts. [One minute later...] No thank you, we don't want any paintings. [One minute later...] No thank you, we don't want any jewellery. I was a bit worried that Lilly couldn't take any more of this shopping pressure before she cracked, especially since the silk pyjamas looked pretty nice, but I have a pretty simple rule: never buy anything on a boat. If we have kids, I plan to instill this rule into them on a regular basis until they're old enough to work it out themselves from basic economic first principles. (Lucky hypothetical kids. I really hope they get my economics genes to cancel out Lilly's shopping genes.) I think she got the message eventually. I also think our boat came back to shore early... Pleasant little cruise though.

Huda is the local beer ­with the best logo, though for taste ­we recommend Festival

We were lucky with the weather - Hue is supposed to be the rainiest city in Vietnam, with all the good weather getting stuck on the mountains, but we had 3 sunny days here. Glad we came.

We were going to hop on a train from Hue, but we learned a number of things that changed our minds:

• There's apparently nothing worth visiting on the train line between Hue and Hanoi (725km away, according to a helpful city centre roadsign)
• The sleeper trains all get into Hanoi between 3 and 5am, and the other trains would spend a whole day travelling
• Lilly hates sleeper trains
• Flights are frequent and cost about 30 quid.

And to give Vietnam Airlines credit, they put on perhaps the smoothest and most efficient flight we've ever been on - it both took off and landed early! A side-note - I've read that Vietnamese people are not used to travelling on long-distance buses or trains, so if you use them, you may see people throwing up. We never saw this on trains or buses, but as we cruised in on a smooth descent I heard the unmistakable sound of a sickbag being used in the seat behind me...