I'm on the Nighttrain

Friday 26 September 2008

So we were on the night train to Hué, which luckily had air conditioning and a friendly Vietnamese chap in the same cabin as us. The only bad thing was the succession of 70s doft rock hits and then a potted history of Vietnamese military success that they insisted on playing over the intercom until about an hour into the journey. Luckily after a while I found a switch which turned it off.

As we travelled through the night the air con actually became a bit to cold, but there was no way of adjusting it so we put up with it.

Hué is a beautiful historical city with a citadel at the centre from the eighteenth century, and an Imperial Palace within the centre of that. Our hotel was right next to the palace, and after lunch our guide Hung (pronounced Hoong) took us around it. The palace was the seat of the Nguyen (pronounced n'WEN) dynasty, the last of Vietnam's dynasties, and for the greater part puppets of the French imperial forces. Not to mention consistently tragic, with many kings murdered, forced to abdicate or barren. But the palace was beautiful and our guide told us lots of facts, like drums symbolise yang (male) and bells symbolise yin (female). Yellow is the colour of royalty, red is for happiness, blue is for hope, green is peace, pink is love and so on.

We saw all of this in the soaring heat, and as soon as we were back in the hotel we jumped in the pool. That evening we had an Imperial meal, with the only couple in the group dressed as the king and queen, and the rest as mandarins and concubines (the second Nguyen king had over 140 concubines, which no doubt was hard to manage).

The meal was sumptuous and afterwards the good Doctor and I, and a couple of others went to a pool bar called DMZ Bar, and shot some pool. We also saw a bit of the practice run of the Singapore Grand Prix, which looked absolutely awesome. I also talked briefly to some American girls, but they were leaving and I don't think their male friends were that happy about it!