We awoke excited, for the motorbike ride was today.
While getting bottled water from the large, modern, and nearby but well-hidden-in-a-paddock supermarket the night before, we also got some pastries and tart-type things for breakfast, and these we ate before taking ourselves downstairs to wait in the lobby. The other larger Intrepid group set off before us, with riders decked out in Intrepid shirts, and shiny helmets. Our four riders wore what they felt like, and had comfortable helmets. We liked our riders more; the larger group probably got a marginally better price.
We rode out of town and onto village tracks, which soon became ankle-deep in water, and the motorbikes slowed a little to prevent too much spray. My rider thought it was hilarious that Alice, on the bike in front, held her legs right up out the water, like a freeze-frame of one of those guys on the pommel horse in the Olympics. She was wearing shoes; I was wearing sandals, which could get a little bit wet. The water got deeper, and then a little deeper after that, as we rode along a concrete track now, the water reaching up to my footrests, and on both sides there stretched a large flat expanse of newly created wetland.
Boats fished there, and moored at the sides of the path, under the shady trees.
Through the village we stopped at a market next to an old wooden bridge, built across a small river. Three of our riders spoke no English, but the fourth, the guide, was very good, five-and-a-half-feet high counting the little button on top of his white cap, had more missing teeth than present ones, and his name was Phuoc. He explained that there had been a lady who had no children, but who was wealthy, and well known, and who decided that her gift to the community would be to build this bridge across the river (she had hoped that the good karma would help her become pregnant – alas no luck). It was built in 1776.
Inside the bridge, which was maybe 10m long, there was a poem, written in Mandarin, framed and displayed in a portico, telling the story of that lady. Now, in Phuoc’s rough translation, she does have children in a sense because people remember her after her death; and that is really what the tradition of ancestor worship is all about. We do the same thing, really, but they are far more systematic about it. We’d just have a picture of Grandad Smith over the mantel, which gets taken down once and only once a year for dusting.
Across the bridge were two interesting things; an agriculture museum and a flood marking post. At the present time, since there had been buckets and buckets of rain about three days before we arrived, the water was about half a metre below the level of the bridge; on the marking post were previous high water marks, several of which were above my head. The agriculture museum was dedicated to the old-time ways and means of sowing, growing and harvesting rice. An ancient hunched lady – I suspect she paid for that bridge – trundled around the museum demonstrating how the machine to separate the heads from the stalks of the rice worked, and how the basket, when thrown properly, would separate the grains of rice from the miscellaneous bits of stalk.
They used to have nets to move water around as well, like a giant Lacrosse stick, but made of tightly woven bamboo. One stands next to the irrigation canal, and picks the water up in the net and throws it into the rice field. Also there were some early-model un-combined harvesters, which you can hook a buffalo up to the front of, and various models of fish nets; attach a lantern to the top of the bamboo frame, and the fish swim right in, and then you pull the net up. And then it’s dinner time.
Peasants the World over, back in the day, were definitely not educated, but they weren’t stupid either.
We took a tour through the market next, which had all the hustle and noise and fresh vegetables and meat being cut and prepared that we had come to expect by now. Supermarkets back home will be rather boring, I think. Outside the market we sat down for a beverage, while the other Intrepid group set off with a bit of a war cry. There were not enough of us for a group war cry; maybe we could have just yelled Geronimo but I didn’t think of it.
Back on the motorboats oops I mean motorbikes we swished back through the recently extended network of canals, and eventually reached a dry dirt path which took us back towards town. The sequence and variety of roads, alleys, paths, intersections and tracks we went through over the remainder of the day is quite difficult to describe, but it was a lot of fun, and nearly half an hour after leaving the Bridge we pulled up at the Monastery. The monastery had a story of it’s own as well. It was funded in the 1860’s by a group of eunuchs.
After watching the monks pray, Phuoc explained the whole thing.
There had been a monk whose mother was sick, and so he took her to his retreat up on the hillside, and looked after her for years, although she did finally die and although the monk received many unusual looks while buying meat in the market in town. The eunuchs, having no children, were possessed of disposable income, and just like the lady who built the bridge, they decided their gift would be to fund the monastery. There are plaques in the main altar, again in Chinese, explaining the whole story and who the building is dedicated to, and also there is a statue of the original monk.
Around behind some other walls are the monks’ graves, ordered by size according to seniority, bordered off by a thick stone wall, and very much encrusted with various green growths. Near the graveyard was a small enclosed statue of a female monk, which is known as the Bodhisattva; in Buddhist tradition the female epitomises compassion, and the woman, instead of reaching nirvana, will choose each time to come back as a woman and therefore be able to alleviate other’s suffering.
And there I was thinking Buddhism might be the only religion which doesn’t put women firmly in the back seat.
Hmmm.
Back on the bikes we took a short trip through some downhill dirt paths, and back up onto tarmac, with my chin strap now properly tightened so that the helmet didn’t fall back every time I turned my head. Along the side of the road we stopped at a store where the ladies made and demonstrated the making of incense, and did the same with those famously conical hats. Alice had been hanging out for one and chose the model with paper silhouettes sewn inside, showing the bridge we had just visited and some other landmarks from around Hue. The incense was remarkable and came in every known colour, but probably wouldn’t get back through customs.
Alice: Watching the incense get rolled was amazing. The lady had incense putty which with a paddle she rolled quickly onto sticks (so that they looked liek the incense we know and love) and then put out to dry. Except all this happened in a matter of seconds. Apparently thousands can be rolled by any one person in a day. Also it smelt good. As the motorbikes passed through this area you periodically got a strong waft of incense (and sometimes garlic – I can’t explain that).
Greg: Up and down another dirt path leading off the other side of the tar we found ourselves wiggling our way up a rutted track between pine trees, which grow plentifully in Viet Nam because they make good wood quickly. Among the pines, overlooking what had become known as the perfume river a few hundred years ago, were the remains of some North Vietnamese army bunkers, while across the river (and into the trees) were the remains of some South Vietnamese army bunkers. Apparently neither side made it across the river, which had it’s name modified after a General of that olden day was courting a woman by taking her on a boat ride, and she thought the river must be named the Perfume River because it was lined with flowers. He was trying to find a wife and so he just went along with it.
After the bunkers we went rolling and rattling through more alleys and tracks and whatnot, and then turned up a hill and through some narrow gates, where we pulled up at a nunnery. Or whatever a place where only women study is called in the Buddhist tradition. In the middle of a pond undergoing construction was a huge statue of the Bodhisattva which we were now easily able to recognise, and round the corner we sat ourselves down at the table in s small hall, and were treated to a magnificent lunch.
The Bodhisattva Nunnery Restaurant
A la Carte Menu
(Reservation Required)
– Entree –
Pumpkin, Lotus seed and tofu soup.
Chips of some description (taro or cassava?)
Mixed plate of enjoyable sushi-stye rolls – including curried eggplant wrapped in some type of leaf
Served with sweetened Lemon Juice
– Main –
Green beans, tomato and thin white mushroom stir fry.
Mung and green beans, tomato, and pineapple concoction (sweet and sour)
Dim Sum/Ravioli type item, fried and filled with finely diced carrot, tofu, mushroom, onion.
Rice (steamed)
– Dessert –
Hot miniature bananas (steamed in a rice steamer)
Grapefruit, of the huge and green, but sweet variety
More lemon juice
Having not gone to the Citadel in the old part of Hue yesterday during our boat trip, we wanted time to do that this afternoon, so the motorbike riders were to drop us there, but the tomb of Tu Duc and the Tiger/Elephant colosseum still to be visited, there was no time to lie down on mats on the stone floor for a light rest.
We reached the tomb at about 1pm, and it was gaspingly hot. I felt like one of those small bananas being steamed. But it was worth it.
Tu Duc was the last of the Emperors of Viet Nam, before their spectacular capitulation to the French in the 1870’s. Obviously while he was alive this building wasn’t used as his tomb, but as his Summer Palace; Tu Duc didn’t really want to be Emperor, it seemed. He always wanted to be a lumberjack a poet and owner of concubines, and a theatre watcher. And he got to do all those things and less at his Summer Palace, and why not? I forget how many concubines he had but it was a lot, and far more than I will ever have, and the palace is surrounded by a huge stone wall (6-7m high?), with landscaped gardens and mighty ancient trees, and a dragon shaped lake.
Tu Duc’s tomb is officially underneath the dragon’s mouth (i.e next to the part of the lake, not under the water), although as with Tsin Shi Huang in Xi’an, all of the workers who built it were sealed inside, or killed, or both. The accepted historical fact is that Tu Duc is buried somewhere on site, but definitely not in his actual large stone tomb. I know that Phuoc knows where he is buried, because he has taken a lot of tour groups around the tomb and he is a smart guy and would eventually get a feeling like ‘He must be under here, yes, this is the place’. But Phuoc pretended not to know.
The building which housed the concubines, who unlike in China were not killed when the Emperor died but instead furnished with cash and lodgings and supervised by eunuchs, was being renovated. That is, the government had taken their sonar machines through, determined that Tu Duc had gotten himself buried underneath the Concubine lodgings, and declared the building ‘off limits’, and ‘unsafe.’
There are ten stone statues, and the elephants they rode in on, guarding the entrance to the walled section which houses Tu Duc’s surface tomb. Just as in Xi’an, they have different ranks which can be told by their uniforms and hairstyles, but unlike the Terracotta Warriors there aren’t 6,000 of them and they are built to be respectfully slightly shorter than the Emperor was. So that’s how they know Tu Duc was less than 5’2″. Up the stone steps there is a colonnade, with four pillars, and inside is Tu Duc’s last poem, inscribed in Mandarin on a huge tablet, of more than 5,000 characters, in which he regrets being a B-grade Emperor, and ceding the whole country to the French, due to spending all his time at the Summer Palace having naptime and composing poems. How long it took him to compose, and what the French were up to during this time period, is not really worth discussing.
His actual tomb is quite a nice piece of craftsmanship; it’s walled off from the rest of the compound, in it’s own courtyard about 30m x 15m, and it’s just a simple stone crypt, which appears much larger due to it being the only thing inside the final nested set of walls.
Across the road we stopped for a cold drink at a little cafe, where our other motorbike riders had been laying in hammocks for quite some time. There was a spare hammock going so I retired there to drink my canned fruit salad juice. When the time came to get back on the bikes we all felt a while lot better, and weren’t really that disappointed when we reached the Colosseum, only to find it was being renovated and all you could was walk around the outside and look through the gates. It used to be that tigers were quite a nuisance in Viet Nam, so the Emperor would set himself up a little Tiger Vs Elephant death match, the trick being that elephants were really quite useful and therefore should be allowed to win the fight if at all possible, so they decided to break the law of the jungle by removing the tiger’s teeth and claws. The animals came in through their own gates on separate sides, and the elephant had only to step on the tiger at the first available opportunity, and the job was done.
Alice: Alice’s memory of this is that the elephant’s got to win because they were the symbol of the King – and all things King related could not be denigrated. We will do some more research and get back to you about who was right on this one.
Greg: The colosseum had roughly a 100m circumference, so I don’t think we missed that much by not being able to climb the stairs and look in at the grass below, and anyway we’ve seen a bigger one in Rome.
Next stop: Citadel. We had photos with our motorbike riders, thanked them very much, and said goodbye. The citadel, if I understand correctly, was the seat of government and therefore the place where Tu Duc probably should have been, but having visited his time, and been drained of all fluids over the course of the day, we felt it was sufficient to have look from the outside, stand in the shade for a bit, and then walk back to our hotel as slowly as possible.
For dinner we went no further than the Mandarin Cafe, where we had a cheap and filling meal of sour noodle soup, garlic bread, vegetable noodle soup, and a Country Style (?) tofu stir fry, and Geelong-Adam figured it prudent to try the Mango and Peanut Butter pancake for dessert. You all should try it home, too. It sounds a bit weird, but it’s actually pretty good. After another thorough examination of Mr Cu’s photos we were able to pick a favourite, and enquired about the price simply so that we could make sure we wouldn’t be able to afford it; but the second smallest print size (6″ x 8″) was only 30,000 VND. So we invested, and Mr Cu was kind enough to sign it for us.
As British-Adam from our previous group used to say, ‘Happy Days’.
And there’s more. Back at the hotel we had to organise, choose, resize and post our photos to the web in lieu of actually having our journals up-to-date, and also video the back-up Wedding Greeting you will all have seen by now. Then we had to dry our eyes and go downstairs into the wireless zone and get it all posted to our site, and order our breakfast for the next morning, and go to bed at half-past-midnight even though we had to get early to get our bus to Hoi An.
But this is travelling. There is always more to do. And it’s fun.
Greg
