Jaunted

Vietnam Field Trip / Embedded Travel Guides / Hue Travel / Forbidden Purple City / Demilitarized Zone / → All Tags

Vietnam By Train: Hue Cool

All week long our roving correspondent Claire Duffett will be sending back her travel reports from Vietnam. Any questions or suggestions? Let us know and we'll have Claire answer them for you.

After trekking through the terraced mountains, I climbed back aboard the train, headed back to Hanoi, then south to Hué (pronounced Hway), a small city in the center of Vietnam, dense with history. It seems almost half the city is contained within the walls of the Citadel, the royal capital of Vietnam’s ousted monarchy.

Inside the stone gate, neighborhoods, moats, and pagodas all surround the Forbidden Purple City, the complex once accessible only to the Nguyen kings and his concubines and eunichs. I expected a maze of opulent palaces; I found a grassy field. Fighting during the American War 40 years ago virtually razed the Forbidden City, and like most things unrelated to the Communist party, little has been done to restore it.

The liveliest part of the grounds is the massive koi ponds near the main entrance, where young Vietnamese feed bread to giant fish who flap and scramble over each other, mouths agape, trying to catch the crumbs.

more ›

Food Porn / → All Tags

Are You Gonna Go My Hue?

Hanoi food blog Stickyrice files this dispatch from Hue, in central Vietnam, and their taste buds were quite impressed. We restrained ourselves from posting about their photo of an animal organ grab bag, however. See it for yourself, but don't say we didn't warn you.

Hue was the Imperial capital of Vietnam, (as well as the site of one of the more famous battles during the Vietnam war) and the cuisine has retained a certain level of pomp and courtliness. That translates into a Vietnamese version of vertical food and tiny portions; at least the mustard leaves wrapping beef and ginger-lemongrass appear to be both delicious and unfussy. We'll find a way to manage.

Who wants seconds?

Related Stories:
·   Exotic, Historic, but Microscopic [Stickyrice]
·   Jaunted Food Porn [Jaunted]