Hai Van Pass and Hue

Happy Birthday to my brother Charles who is celebrating his 6oth on Sunday. Happy birthday, Chas!

These guides take their work very seriously. Haven’t had a slacker yet. Two days ago, we left Hoi An. Tin and Nam, our driver, were loading our bags promptly at eight, despite an unexpected downpour. The walkways of the hotel were all canopied so we didn’t get wet, though Nam surely did. We were on the road by 8:15 tearing through small villages and almost flooded streets which made me a nervous wreck having experienced a flash flood that stalled and flooded our car during our first years in Dallas. But the van barreled on through and although the waves it created looked like the tsunami, we didn’t stall. We were headed for the Hai Van Pass just outside of Da Nang and it would be a shame if the weather were not clear enough to see. But Tin promised it would clear and it did.

As you’ve gathered by now, I always get suspicious when they say we are stopping at such and such “factory”—it reminds me of the perfume factories in Grasse and the pottery factories in Mexico and Italy or the “jewelry” factories everywhere where you are submitted to a lame demonstration of whatever the product is and then ushered into a showroom and hustled to buy, usually at grossly inflated prices. But the marble factory we pulled into next, like the lantern factory from the day before, was legit. By now the rain had stopped. First, we drove through a village dominated by a mountain which Tin said was nick-named Marble Mountain by the GIs during the war. The town itself is full of marble artists who are carving the most incredible statues of everything from Buddhas to American Indians. Marble slabs are piled up on both sides of the street and every shop or house is littered with marble debris. We passed through the town and then turned into the marble “factory.” Because it was Sunday, there were only a couple of carvers at work, but this was the real deal. The slabs and marble dust were everywhere and the yard outside was loaded with partially finished pieces from small to huge. The workmanship is first-rate and if we’d had the time and the money, it would have been great to buy some fabulous piece and ship it home. But we settled for a couple of small souvenirs—incense boxes and small ring boxes—instead. Note the picture of the two smiling Buddhas above.

Next we traveled on to Da Nang, the location of the famous China Beach infamous during the Vietnam War. Then a site of bloody battle, now it is a serene and quiet expanse of sand and sky enclosed by gentle mountains.

We eventually started to climb into the higher elevations to the Hai Van Pass, one of the highest points in Vietnam. The scenery was spectacular as we hairpinned up the mountain side while drinking in the views and snapping pictures of the bay below. One area of beach had been a leper colony up until the 1930’s because the “unclean” could be secluded nicely from the rest of the population. We stopped along the way to take pictures and at the summit there was a rest stop with some American bunkers left over from the war, souvenir shops and beautiful views of the whole surrounding vista. There were also some highly aggressive “merchants,” one of whom glommed onto me and wouldn’t stop touching me and talking to me in her broken English. She kept saying I like you and where are you from and how many children do you have and how old are you, and don’t you like these bracelets, three for a dollar, blah, blah, blah. At first it was amusing, but after a few unrelentless minutes of being stroked and almost cuddled, it was unnerving to say the least. We each had our own “stroker” and though we had been warned by Tin that this was the drill and not to buy, we finally had to say get us out of here, PLEASE! I don’t know what school of marketing they go to that advocates this hard-sell approach, but it’s not my favorite. As we piled back into the van and it was clear we were not going to succumb, my lady stuck out her lower lip into a pout and glared and glared. I hope she didn’t put some sort of Vietnamese hex on me….I think there is a rash starting to break out on my….

We still had a major site to see before checking into the hotel which Mary and I knew was going to be a good one and which we wouldn’t have time to enjoy. So after a late lunch that was included in our itinerary and not very good, we continued on to the Purple Forbidden City modeled after Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City in Beijing which we will see later in the trip. Home to generations of emperors and their families and harems (one had 142 children with his numerous wives), it is a vast complex which I can’t begin to summarize here. When I post this later, I will try to post a link for anyone interested.

That night we had dinner at a private home in Hue. Professor An, a 60-ish Vietnamese scholar whose wife is the granddaughter of one of the royals, has opened up his home and gardens to visitors like us who, for a fee, get a tour of the gardens and an explanation of the feng shui inherent there by the professor himself, and then a look at the interior of the house which is filled with antiques and memoriabilia from his life. This gave us a glimpse into a typical though obviously upper class version of how people live, and after we had seen various souvenirs of his very interesting life and travels, we were treated to a seven-course dinner prepared by his wife and served by his niece who enjoys practicing her English while majoring in Mandarin Chinese at the university. She plans to be an interpreter. The food was delicious and the ambience authentic to say the least. Again, this seems a clear example of a Vietnamese “capitalist” who decided to market his skills in a special way in order to make a living. I don’t know how often he does this (or what it cost since it was part of our package), but it was most interesting and he and the few other family members we met honestly made us feel welcome. While it was just the four of us, there were three tables that could have seated maybe up to 15-18 people at a time. Quite an enterprise.

Yesterday we went sightseeing in Hue, another lovely Vietnamese city north of Da Nang. First a boat ride down the Perfume River on a replica of the royal water transport to a famous pagoda called the Pagoda of the Heavenly Lady which Tin clearly loved and called it “darling.” We had a 2:40 plane to Hanoi and were pressed for time, but he managed to squeeze in two of the scheduled royal tombs—those of the second and eleventh emperors of Vietnam. The emperors would design their own tombs which could take years and of course covered acres of land and were comprised of a whole complex of buildings.

When the tomb was finished, the emperor and his family would use it as a summer resort until his death when it then fulfilled its original purpose and was closed to everyone except the guardians who protected the now holy site. The second emperor took 15 years to design and build the one we saw and then died almost immediately after it was completed, so the poor chap really didn’t get to enjoy it at all. The second one, tomb of the eleventh emperor, was built during the 1920’s and had a much different style than what we had seen previously. The mosaic work on the inside was amazing. It would have been nice to inspect the mosaics more carefully, but we had a 2:40 plane to catch to Hanoi. Mary and I were so excited to be returning to this most wonderful and quirky city where we had spent several days three years ago. We have just one day there before we board the much anticipated (with some dread I might add) overnight train to Sapa, the mountain town where we will spend the 3-4 days. But first Hanoi.