This trip, like many of the other times we’ve been to Vietnam, includes Hoi An for tailoring and relaxing, but as usual, we’ve added one other place to the trip. This time it’s the Imperial capital, Hue.
We visited here on our first trip to Vietnam back in 2014, but haven’t been back since, so it seemed like a good idea.
We flew in to Da Nang on Vietjet – my first time flying with them. The flight out of Perth was at a very civilised time of the morning, but was running about half an hour late. Things didn’t seem too bad until we were waiting for our connecting flight in HCMC and we realised the airline had somehow changed our flight to the one an hour later without telling us, which would put out all of our connections on the other end out. We managed to go backwards through security etc and after a few false starts found someone who was able to put us back on the correct flight, just in time. Phew! An hour of running around.
So we were able to meet our transfer in Da Nang and the van bounced its way up to Hue in the dark, depositing us at the Thanh Lich Royal hotel, our home for the next four days.
Our first day was a bit of wandering, heading up to the Perfume River to walk along the boardwalk and parkland along the river. We had joked we were coming to Vietnam in the middle of their summer to defrost from the Perth winter, and we certainly were defrosting in the muggy 35C.
R was keen to check out the big markets, so we headed there for a late lunch. We sat down at one of the little stalls, and even though we’d only asked for one thing, our hostess kept bringing out more food, presenting R with a much larger bill than expected at the end. Tasty though!
We wandered around the block and found a supermarket, not the most common of services here, so popped in to explore, as we love seeing supermarkets in different places. Here you pick your chicken pieces yourself out of the tub in the fridge section, rather than asking the deli attendant or picking up a plastic wrapped packet. The two-minute-noodle aisle is huge, and the confectionary aisle minuscule in comparison to the ones at home.
We’d planned to check out the rooftop bar at our hotel that evening, but arrived on the roof just as the thunderstorm that had been brewing hit. The staff were packing everything away and battening down the hatches so we headed back to our room to watch the storm from the tenth floor. The sheet lightning and fork lightning were pretty dramatic!
For dinner we headed to a little seafood place across the road. We shared crab sticky rice, claypot crab and snails in salted egg sauce. Yum! Our street is a walking street on the weekend, so we took a walk along and had ice cream for dessert.
R was keen to check out the demilitarised zone to the north and booked a day tour out to Khe Sanh. Not being a big war tourism fan, I wasn’t really anticipating a lot of fun, but we did get to see some old planes at the Khe Sanh former air base (which is otherwise now used as a coffee plantation growing an uncommon variety – liberica.)
We had lunch at a passionfruit plantation down the road, accompanied by a local stray cat (“This is not our cat…” but it was very keen to help us finish off our lunch!)
We drove along one of the branches of the Ho Chi Minh trail up to the 17th parallel to where the DMZ had eventually been agreed upon and saw the bridge and one of the famously competitive flagpoles. By this point it was raining torrentially!
The final stop of the day was the Vinh Moc tunnels, north of the DMZ, where a bunch of villages hid out while the bombing was happening. The soil on this hill was very clay-y which made it relatively easy to dig the tunnels and made them solid. It wasn’t great being in enclosed spaces 23m below the ground, but I could certainly appreciate how difficult it would have been for the people hiding out there. I was thankful we only spent 5-15 mins at a time underground, unlike the villagers who were seeking refuge there for up to 5 days at a time!
We waved goodbye to the group and headed out to a different place for dinner – Nina’s Cafe a ten minute walk away from the hotel. We had a bunch of small dishes to share like spring rolls, the Hue version of banh xeo, and banana flower salad.
The third day was a chilled day with nothing much planned. We took a taxi out to the Aeon Mall to check out the shops, and had Japanese for lunch, wandered a bookshop (the Vietnamese book covers for translated fiction were gorgeous!) and tried our hand at an archery game. Love doing archery with real arrows at a shopping centre…
We also spent some time at a cat cafe with some delightful kitties – a Munchkin, some Norwegian Forest Cats, a couple of Maine Coons, and various other breeds. The Mocha Cat Cafe basically charges you by the hour to hang out with the cats and you get unlimited teas/coffees while you are there, but pay extra for treats for the cats if you want.
We finally managed to get to the rooftop bar for an iced tea, and then headed back to the seafood place cross the street for dinner again. This time we tried the Thai herb mussels and splurged on a salt roasted baby lobster. Delicious!
Next stop: Hoi An!
Two Weeks Away 