Journey Deep into Heart of Vietnam to Ancient Imperial City

Day 76, 2024 Grand World Voyage

Tuesday, March 19, 2024; Da Nang, Vietnam

During previous cruise port calls in Vietnam, I’ve come away thinking that I should book a week or longer in this country. It is a beautiful country – mostly lush green with stunning beaches and rugged mountains. The people (and there are many of them!) are friendly and quite a number speak English. And I love the food.

Even though I hadn’t been to today’s port of Da Nang before, I left it behind for an all-day tour to Huế, the imperial city of the Nguyen emperors (1802-1945).

Huế is almost three hours from Da Nang, so we stopped along the way for the all-important bathroom break, where at least all the women were glad to see traditional Western toilets. I had a few minutes to snap some pictures of the oyster fishermen working the nearby lagoon.

Once at Huế, we zig-zagged around the city of nearly 700,000 to visit tombs, temples, pagodas, palaces, shrines and a beautiful restaurant for a delicious lunch.

The tomb of Emperor Tự Đức, the longest-ruling emperor (1847 to 1883), is in a palatial park that he built for his personal retreat. The tomb seemed quite plain amidst the other colorfully and intricately decorated buildings, ponds and forest.

Later in the day we visited the Citadel with its rings of walls leading to a forbidden city. Much of this area was destroyed by war, first with the French and then with the Americans, but one palace has been restored. Like much of Huế, it is decorated with vibrant colors, and served as a backdrop for a number of photography sessions.

Lunch was a highlight, at a restaurant amid ponds, fountains and Asian light fixtures made from straw hats that I expect to see any day on HGTV’s home decorating shows. We sampled from nine courses, ranging from fig salad to lotus seed chicken soup to shrimp with passion fruit sauce, delivered to a lazy Susan in the middle of our table. It works much better than the buffets on our Japan tours with their long slow lines.

After lunch we boarded “dragon boats” – really pontoon boats with dragon decorations – for a ride up the Perfume River, so named due to the fragrance of the flowers along the banks.

Entrepreneurial women on the boat sold, among other souvenirs, magnets with quilling, an art created by tightly rolling and shaping paper. I had to purchase a few, even though I have boxes of quilling somewhere in storage. Our mother – a true artist — founded what became at one time the world’s largest manufacturer of quilling paper, books and supplies. Nowadays you mainly see the intricate art on cards, most of which are made in Vietnam.

Our river destination was the Thien Mu Pagoda, a revered Buddhist Shrine, the tallest building in Huế and the official symbol of the city.

In one of the surrounding buildings is the blue car driven by Thích Quảng Đức to his death. He was a Buddhist monk who in 1963 set himself on fire in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the persecution of Buddhists. (President Kennedy said of the famous photograph of his self-immolation that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one”). It was a solemn reminder of Vietnam’s violent past.

We are finding that tourism has been slow to return to Asia after the pandemic, and many guides may have left the industry. With a 3,000-passenger Celebrity ship also in the area, today’s guide must have been part of the B team. His English wasn’t bad, but I had to work hard to understand him. He gave us very little history or background and didn’t manage our time well. As a result, we never made it to the Dong Ba Market, to the disappointment of some on our bus (but probably not to everyone). We had a choice, but by then we were running so late that we agreed to skip it and begin the three-hour drive back to the port, dodging motorcycles and scooters throughout the city. It gave me plenty of time to sort through my many photographs (a project that never seems to end).

When we arrived back at the ship at 7:30 p.m., I was glad to see the Lido buffet was still open, but even happier to talk one of the beverage servers into giving me a happy hour price on a much-needed drink.