After spending approximately eight kajillion hours on buses during this trip, I'm trying to find alternate means of transportation whenever possible. (I'm sure you'll remember from math class that a kajillion is a million bazillions.) I heard it was possible to visit the tombs by boat. Spending a day on a boat on the Perfume River sounds better than spending it on a bus.
After a couple tourist trap stops we visited the Thien Mu Pagoda, a truly beautiful site overlooking the river from Ha Khe Hill about three miles west of town. This is the entrance, looking up at the seven-storey tall stupa, the tallest in Vietnam.
You can see quite a few tourists here, but you ain't see nuthin' yet. I enjoyed strolling the Imperial Palace partly because there were so few tourists. No such luck here.
I was able to capture a few glimpses of what the place might have looked like as a place of quiet meditation after it was built in 1601.
I was on a cheapie tour so we didn't have a lot of time to stroll the grounds. It was only after the visit that I learned that supposedly on the grounds is the car to which Thich Quang Duc was driven to his self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, as seen in this legendary photograph.
From there we traveled about an hour to the foot of Mount Ngoc Tran, about six miles from Hue, to visit Hon Chen Temple, built by the Chams about 1,000 years ago. The site sits on a hill with an impressive view of the river, but the temple itself is small and has an intimate feel to it.
From there we went to the tomb of Khai Dinh, as seen in the top photo. It's a stone edifice built into the side of a mountain, which to dorks like me calls to mind the city of Minas Tirith in the Lord of the Rings. The weather was overcast that day and lent a gunmetal grey aspect to all the photos, as seen in this spectacular view from the tomb overlooking the surrounding countryside.
You can literally see the air. But even the weather couldn't diminish the almost ridiculous grandeur of the place, perhaps best seen on this particular day inside the tomb.
Ever wonder how incense is made? Yeah, well, me neither. But here it is.
After the tomb we stopped in little village where the stuff is produced. The street is lined with shops that sell incense. The finished products are displayed like floral bouquets.
In the distance are two other shops selling incense on the other side of the road. These same shops sell something else Hue is famous for, the making of the famous Vietnamese conical hat, or non la.
I had seen tourists in Southeast Asia wearing these hats, which struck me at the time as a little silly. Imagine my delight, then, when I arrived in Vietnam and discovered that people here actually wear them. It makes all the sense in the world. They are virtually weightless and block all sun from the face and neck.
It's one of the things I love about this country: It looks exactly the way I imagined it. Parts of Thailand, by way of comparison, look like Myrtle Beach. Nothing against Myrtle Beach, but if I want to see it I'll drive to South Carolina, not fly halfway around the world.
From there we went to the main stop of the day, the tomb of Tu Doc. All constructions on the grounds include the word Khiem ("modesty") in their names, which couldn't be more ironic considering there are nearly 50 buildings on a site the size of a small town. The surrounding wall is more than a mile in circumference.
This building would make a decent-sized house, but Xung Khiem Pavilion is where the emperor would go to write poetry.
On the right is a small island that was stocked with game for the emperor to hunt. I couldn't help but laugh imagining the emperor sitting in quiet contemplation, spending hours crafting a poem, then grabbing his gun, crossing the lake and blowing some poor monkey's head off.
Obviously if the emperor was writing poetry and hunting he wasn't quite dead yet. It was his final resting place, but he started planning the tomb long before his death in 1883. The site served as a retreat during his lifetime.
The history of this tomb is quite interesting. The king had over a hundred wives and concubines but no children! He may have become sterile from smallpox. Or he may have been cursed. That apparently was his opinion, which is part of the reason he wanted another palace to live in.
He required so much labor and increased taxes so much to build the tomb that he had to suppress a coup.
With all the buildings and lakes and gardens and canals and islands and so on and so forth the actual tomb was a bit anti-climactic.
Maybe that's because he's not actually buried there! After building this elaborate resting place the king was buried somewhere else. No one knows where. The guy definitely had a flair for the dramatic, as seen here in this building. It's called the Stele Pavilion for the giant stone slab in the center, which is about twice as tall as the tourist standing next to it.
The stone is inscribed with the king's epitaph. Normally it would fall to his heir to write it, but because the king was childless he had to write it himself. He wasn't the most subtle guy, so of course the stele is the largest of its type in Vietnam. The stone was brought from a quarry over 300 miles away and took four years to complete the trip.
To the right is a type of tree I'd never seen before. The girl at my hotel told me it's called a su tree, although that's not a very good spelling, because to pronounce it in Vietnamese requires using a vowel sound that doesn't correspond to an English letter. The trees only have leaves and flowers at the tips of the branches, which are rounded on the end like stubby fingers.
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