Day 26 - Hue, Vietnam

Day 26 – His.

The train was surprising comfortable except for the occasions the train company decided to add or take away carriages. They did this randomly and with no warning so several times in the night the train would be violently rocked backwards and forwards. So violently that I could have sworn I was going to be tipped out of the bunk. Which wouldn’t have been much fun as I was on the top bunk. After a while I decided it would be far more upsetting if the train were to lurch violently from side to side as this would we mean we were derailing. Thankfully there was no way this could have happened as I think we didn’t go more than 30 miles an hour for most of the journey.

We all pretty much got up at 7. There is an unspoken communal agreement to get up at 7 on most sleeper trains it would seem. At least prior to 7 everyone tip toes around but after 7 they thump about selling things for breakfast.

This journey had a surreal gothic air to it. When Patti got up to brush her teeth and wash she pulled open the door and a Vietnamese breakfast vendor popped up like a jack-in-the-box and yelled ‘Soup. Soup.’ Into her face. The man looked like a half mad skeleton; bone thin, wild white hair and the kind of staring eyes you last saw in a Jack Nicholson movie as he was clutching an axe. Patti, bless her, kept her composure, hurriedly shook her head and pushed past him. He went off mumbling something to wait for the next tourist to open a door – maybe this was his hobby – I didn’t see any soup.

The train were on was due in at 11 in the morning so we had a few hours to kill which we did by reading and chatting. It turns out Heidi’s last name is Frank.

‘Oh,’ said I. ‘Is that like Anne Frank?’

But Heidi told us that her great grandfather had changed it when he came to America and it used to be Frankenstein.

How lucky is that – we have spent the night on a gothic horror night train with Frankenstein’s great granddaughter. Heidi is an excellent character if only a little gullible. She insists the fantasy world in the book  ‘Princess Bride’ is real and has spent the last few years hoping to climb the cliffs of insanity. I don’t know if i have the heart to disabuse her.

The train arrived on time despite dire warning from Vinh to the contrary and an awaiting minibus escorted us to our hotel. We have a free day today and so we went for a walk around the town. Hue is the old capital and is small (only 300,000 people live here) so the walk didn’t take long. It is right in the middle of the DMZ and suffered terribly in the war. On the train ride here – along with buffalos in paddy fields and people ploughing with stick ploughs – we saw a few old tanks on concrete plinths as memorials. The railroad track passed a lot of graveyards with fairly ornate tombs. Vinh tells us that the people believe the size of their tomb is a mark of how well they will be respected when they are dead. People are strange.

Our walk into town was constantly attended by the cyclo riders. A cyclo is a kind of bicycle rickshaw and the people who ride them are not ones for taking no for an answer. It can be a bit grating. However, they speak quite quietly and i find yelling at them ‘What? What? Speak up man!’ is a bit disconcerting for them. As is saying – ‘My God you are right! That is an incredibly reasonable price.’ Then saying no thank you seems to put them off. But i have only just begun to try this – so I need to experiment more.

The Hotel has a pool! This is better news than it may seem at first. Mostly because it is so baking hot here that just standing up get you sticky with sweat – I am reminded of China again. I hope Patti realises this counts as her hot holiday.

Tonight we are to go to dinner at a local family’s place. They are friends of Vinh and they have invited us all for dinner – it should be fun – well at least interesting.

 

Day 26 – Hers.

The meal with the Vietnamese family was delicious and very interesting.  We were greeted by the 92-year-old grandmother of the family.  We sat in the ornate chairs of the main reception room – no children allowed – while Vinh introduced us and explained the layout of the house and the importance of the two altars: one to the ‘Mother Goddess’ and the other to the ancestors.  The central section of the house was flanked by sections for the families of each of Grandma’s children who still live in Vietnam.  Two of Grandma’s children had to emigrate after the ‘American War’ because they had fought with the US for the south.  Hue was the location of the infamous TET offensive – North Vietnamese soldiers had hidden in the ancient citadel.  The citadel and surrounding town were completely destroyed by bombing – the residents of Hue, including Grandma and her young family, ran for the hills – stepping over the dead bodies of their neighbours as they ran. Vinh told us earnestly that the Vietnamese do not dwell on the war – that when Vietnam opened its doors to tourists and émigrés after twenty years of rebuilding, it was ready to forget all the wars of its past and use tourism to its beautiful country as a way to develop.

Grandma demonstrated her oral hygiene routine to us.  Traditionally, after a Vietnamese woman had married, she daily chewed a concoction of acorn, lamb fat and leaves; this freshened her breath and strengthened but blackened her teeth.  The sign of a married woman was therefore black teeth – it was a way to let men know who was already taken – to make a married woman unattractive to other men.  Modern Vietnamese women are allowed to just wear a ring......

We saw the family’s kitchen – two gas burners, work surface, a stepped wooden table and another altar to the ‘Kitchen god’.  The kitchen god keeps an eye on the happiness of the home (Is a meal cooked for everyone every day, keeping the heart of the home warm?) and is believed to report on the family in the week before the new year.  Based on this ‘report’, families will have good or bad luck for the following year.

We sat at a table in Grandma’s son’s house.  It was also a shop, open to the street and locals came in intermittently to buy a coke or the local beer.  Conversation was lively, Heidi redeeming herself for her earlier gullibility by scoring knowledge points throughout the meal and the young grandson running around, taking photos and pretending to be Spiderman.

I lost track of the courses – there were seven or eight of them, beginning with a delicious pumpkin, peanut and coconut soup (that I might try to make at home) and spectacularly light spring rolls, through various dishes of meats and vegetables with rice, finishing with another soup and then pineapple you were to dip in salt.

We took a taxi back to the hotel – we were so full, walking would have been difficult – and went up to the bar on the hotel’s top floor to gaze out at the lights of the city below.  We filled our water bottles from the large supply Vinh had arranged and retired to bed, sound asleep well before 11.