Sunday I booked a boat tour with an English guide to see the pagodas and tombs of kings in the surrounding area. I was picked up by a large bus and off we went towards the river, except when we got to the river we made a left and kept driving. Meanwhile the guide cheerily announced he would do the tour in both english and Vietnamese.
The 3 tombs were amazing and all different, even though if you were to ask any of the native Hue-ians they would say they are the same. The tour went like this 10-15 min of vietnamese then "we are at the tomb you have 55 minutes". Direct translation I am sure.
The three tombs were from different eras. Minh Mang's (1820-40) tomb is spectacular and huge. Khai Din's (1916-25) tomb is smaller but architecturally intriguing and clearly took every second of its 11 years to build. He designed his tomb after Gaudi and this tomb is a flamboyant tribute to all that is high maintenance.
The last tomb was the least vibrant but housed the most interesting of the guys. Tu doc reigned from 1848-83 and lived on the campus for his last 16 years with his 104 wives and countless concubines (oh the olden days...). Pretty impressive if you ask me. I am hoping his painting didn't do him justice. although his height of 1.5 meters suggests maybe in back then that many women equaled what a few ferraris in obnoxious colors and a reality tv show would do for him now. He actually sized the traditional stone mandarins and animals outside of his tomb super small so they would be shorter than him. Another interesting factoid along this front is he never had any offspring. And the final icing on the cake is he was never buried here and to prevent graverobbers all 200 of the servants who buried him were beheaded. His real tomb has never been found.
Tons of westerners flock to these spectacles. My favorite was a texan in a Mercedes hat and a weight lifting belt talking about the tomb of Tu Doc: "why don't they get in here with a pressure washer and clean it all up? It wouldn't take but a few days and right now it looks scuzzy." He repeatedly asked his guide each time louder and slower with more southern drawl. Ummmmmm. Well sir there are a host of reasons that can't happen; the first being if you blasted the fragile architecture and the few remaining relics with a high powered stream of water you would be left with even less structures than you currently have.
In addition to the tombs, we still didnt get on a boat, but we went to a Vietnamese Kung Fu type show where some dude attempted to impale himself on a spear only saved by his adam's apple and then ask for donations, a village where we watched ladies make cone hats and incense and I had to dig deep into my forgotten French to barter for this lady so she didn't get ripped off, and a pagoda. And between the tombs instead of the fun facts above (which likely only happened in not english) we were treated to our guide belting out quite a comprehensive righteous brothers medley for about 15 min with "see you understand" interspersed in between verses. I was lucky enough to have a front row seat.
Finally there was a boat that took us on a 5 minute ride to a barren patch of land that the tour guide said was a garden. We stayed long enough to all get mosquito bites thus validating our malaria prophylaxis and pay some random woman a buck for keeping up the "garden."
That night I met the two new hilarious and fun attendings. Both from Boston. One more scared of the food than the other. And neither scared of the beer. They had actually taken a boat ride that afternoon and after six beers had walked away from their boat trip with new shirts and pants and a variety of things like coasters to the tune of way too much money. They also played with the lady's kids for the whole trip. So she essentially made more money than most doctors here make in a month while they babysat her children. Just one example that Vietnamese women are to be feared for their amazing combo of hard nosed business and sweet charm.
The pics: the tombs, the singing tour guide, hats, incense, and the 5 min boat
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