Hue - the old imperial capital

The place it rains almost as much as Durban!

 (A joke for Buzz and my other South African friends who remember my oddball journey to that fair city.)

We arrived in Hue in the middle of the rainy season, apparently they average over 300mm in Oct and we certainly had our fair share. When it comes down though it really really comes so that it never lasts for over an hour so if you just sit tight then hopefully you can wait it our and continue with whatever it is you fancy doing and in Hue there is a fair bit to fancy. The old walled city is a place of made different bits that make up a truly  original whole. The old city walls enclose a city that is modern and vibrant without high rise buildings (nothing in the city is allowed to go over the height of the old imperial court meeting building) All the buildings are fairly new as the Americans did a fair bit of land clearance in 1960s, 

so in true Vietnamese style everything is just mashed in as much as they can manage.... here's one of the local engineering workshops

Inside the old city is the imperial city which is in a strange state, in that some of the buildings have been perfectly restored:-

While others are in need of a bit of work:-

The gardens themselves are for the most part perfectly kept:-

We read that the whole place was redesigned almost totally by each separate emperor, we realised however that the heat and humidity meant that most of the place would gave to be restored every decade anyway (I saw an interpretation board on one temple about it's restoration in the 1980's and the place looked like it would have to be done again very soon.

When we were in Hanoi we met a student there whose home town was Hue.  Hue is thought to be the most intellectual and refined city and she had gone to a very prestigious high school there and she was very proud of her city so she gave us a list of places we might like to explore and also some good food and drink places.

The restaurants were amazing and we tried some new and interesting things, you have no idea how many things they can do with rice as it can be made into a paste or liquid/batter or sheets like pasta which then get cooked in a variety of different ways, but what was really great was getting to these places which were in different parts of town.

We had been walking in the humid heat next to a frenetic road for a while on our way to a pagoda when we decided we wanted to find one of these restaurants which was near by, here's our starter:- Not that we are going to get into the habit of taking pictures of our food

However at 30p we sort of fell in love with this place..... The rice paper rolls are rather spicy in themselves but just in case there is the hot sweet dipping sauce and the extra chilies & garlic just to tide you over! We then took one of Andy's famous short cuts and ended up in an alleyway.  It was shady and cool and an oasis of calm, with beautiful flowers and plants lining the way, it was such a wonderful contrast.

We also took a boat trip to go and see the Tombs which were built in 1840s for the emperors when Hue was the capital.

  The tombs and pagodas and temples we saw on this 6 hour boat trip were really interesting.  One of them was set in what looked like an English country house setting until you looked a the trees more closely.

 However what was remarkable was that we had the boat to ourselves for the whole day with two crew and a fabulous meal at lunch time for a total of £15 and to be honest if we were better at bargaining it probably would have been less.

They also have a thing for Griffins so here's a picture:-

Mel:- I've put lots of other griffin pics on the g-drive in previous post for you! XXX

 Written in Nha Trang Vietnam's version of Brighton of which more later. Love to all A & L