A Return: Hoi An and My Son

From Hue I took a bus to Hoi An.

Hoi An, which means "peaceful meeting place" is in South Central Vietnam on the coast of the South China Sea. The town is recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because it is an exceptionally well-preserved example of a 15th to 19th century trading port. It used to be a major hub for all kinds of trade, but particularly spice trade. These days, from what I saw, the economy is based on tourism, souvenirs, and custom tailoring- people are constantly trying to sell you clothing of any design you'd like, tailored to fit you and made in a few days.

I arrived in the evening and wandered around the lantern-strung old area of the city, which is incredibly lovely, and features a lot of crumbling bright yellow paint, contrasted with white trim and dark wood accents.

My camera is unhappy with nighttime. 

Even though these are the actual original buildings, something about the style of restoration or the lanterns hung everywhere gives it a slight Disneyland feel. Maybe it's because every other window is full of souvenirs.

The next day was hellishly hot, but I went out into the streets again to see things in the bright light of day. The town was pretty empty because of the heat, and in the glaring sunlight the buildings looked realer than they had in the glow of the lanterns the day before. I strolled around, dripping with sweat and taking pictures of the riotous blossoms and beautiful old buildings.

The town is perfumed with garish flowers...

...and incense burning in holders on telephone poles. 

It's a gorgeous place, and one where you can see a lot of Chinese influence on the Vietnamese aesthetic.

Because Hoi An was a  trading post, though, you've got all kinds of peoples and cultures meeting up here. They've got a covered bridge built by the Japanese, and they're so proud of it that they charge for entry. So here's a picture of it from the side.

And at one point I ducked into an alley and took one of my favorite photos of the whole trip:

Also, the sidewalks are strewn with puppies being watched by old ladies in sandals. It is truly a utopia.

While in the area I went to check out My Son (pronounced mee sun), a cluster of abandoned and partially ruined Hindu temples constructed between the 4th and the 14th century by the Champa people. This once-great civilization lives on in the 400,000 remaining Cham people, who live mainly in Vietnam and Cambodia and are thought to have originally migrated from Borneo. How about that.

My Son was heavily damaged by American carpet bombing in the Vietnam War. When our tour guide said this, a Canadian woman I had been chatting with on the bus to the ruins crowed, "War crimes!!", almost triumphantly. The guide looked at her sharply but only quietly replied, "No- just a mistake." The Americans had received faulty intelligence that the Viet Cong were using the temples for shelter, so of course the U.S. bombed the hell out of the place. In the space of a single week carpet bombing had reduced most of it, including the temple thought to be the grandest, to formless piles of stones.

The stonework on what remains is pretty splendid, and viewed against the backdrop of the low mountains the ancient, crumbling structures look elemental. They're made of brick, but puzzlingly, there's no mortar. The building techniques used here are still not well understood; it's thought that the bricks were hardened by fire (at what point in the building process is hard to say) or maybe joined with resin. 

I've misplaced many of my photos of the finer carvings on the buildings, but this script should give you a sense of the skill that was at work here:

The temples fell into disuse following the decline of the Champa empire and were "discovered" by a Frenchman in 1898. In the early 1900's a French scholarly society began studying the ruins, which seems to have mainly consisted of lopping the heads off of of statues and sending them to the storerooms of European museums, never to return (not yet, anyway).

 Many of the temples are propped up and covered to keep them from further degradation, although it's not clear how well that's working, or whether they'll be restored anytime soon.

And walking from one site to the other (the place is pretty spread out and forms a sort of suburban complex of temples), I often would glance off into the woods and see a temple that was being left to nature's devices:

To one degree or another.

Restorative efforts are proceeding at a breakneck pace.

After the ruins of My Son, the packaged tour I'd opted for included a trip back to Hoi An by boat. I remember being incredibly bored on this boat trip. I might have been hungover from dinner with some Australians the night before, and I'd gotten up at 6:30 am for this tour, and it was damned hot, and all of that and more made me apathetic about this return trip. Looking at these photos, I can't believe how jaded I was at the time.

We stopped at a waterside village where the people were famous for their woodworking. They craft very fine, bright-eyed boats.

When I asked why the boats have eyes, I got a few answers. My guide said that they have eyes so they can see their way back to shore. But he asked one of the nearby fishermen, who said that fish have eyes, so why not boats? Reasonable. 

The people in this village are also known for detailed woodworking. 

Like this award-winning... thing.

Pretty nice.

You can stop reading here if you want to end on a high note. Stop

right

here.

But if you'll brace yourself for some whining, I'd like to add a PSA for anyone who is or plans on backpacking:

This place was really beautiful, and I did some interesting things and met interesting people while I was there. But, for whatever reason, I was borderline miserable the entire time I was in Hoi An. When I arrived there I had been backpacking for two and a half months, sleeping in uncomfortable beds in crowded hostels or lonely hotel rooms, wearing the same four sets of clothes on rotations and, I felt, having basically the same conversations with the same types of people. Here's a real bummer of an excerpt from my journal at the time:

"...suddenly all the stress and loneliness, and homesickness that I've kept suspended, hanging by fragile strings, crashes on me. And I feel so alone, and I want to go home, and I don't care about your ancient architecture or your paper lanterns. I'm tired of not having a real conversation. I'm tired of sweating and insect bites and food that doesn't taste right and people who laugh at me (I know they are) and people who don't know me. Nobody knows me here. And it's not freeing, it's horrible. I feel erased."

This makes for pretty obnoxious reading in hindsight, seeing as it was, objectively, the opportunity of a lifetime to see a different culture.  I'd love to go back to this place now and sit in the sun and eat pho until it came out of my ears, but at the time my feelings were genuine. So to those who are currently or would like to take a trip like this in future: unless you are a natural nomad, you will probably feel this way. You'll be tired and exhausted with the alienness of all of it and bored of latching on to strangers and telling your abbreviated life story. You will have these first world problems. Expect them.

Next: Dalat, very briefly

Update

As some of you might have noticed and then forgotten because it was so long ago, this blog once existed.

I fell off of it for a variety of reasons. Reason A is that the posts were taking me ages, because I felt unable to just toss the photos up and just leave them without writing anything about the people or the history of wherever I was. But after lingering for three days in a particularly charmless town called Dalat for the sole purpose of catching up on blogging, I realized that things were getting a little silly. Reason B is that it became difficult to find internet cafes in Vietnam that would allow me to plug in my USB to upload photos. Reason C is that when I finally did plug my USB into a computer it turned out to be the wrong computer. The damn thing got all scrambled, and I was unable to access my photos for ages. It was six weeks before a sweet Cambodian teenager with a Flock of Seagulls hairstyle in an internet cafe in Battambang cleared that up for me. By that time I couldn't even begin to catch up.

But I did write everything down in this now-battered leather bound notebook:

on the advice of my mother. Before I left she told me to keep a journal, because when she rereads the postcards that her twenty-something self wrote her parents from Crete and Beirut and Cairo she can barely remember those days compressed to fit on a few square inches.

So if I have these

detailed and dated entries, sketches, cards, lanyards, leaves, and brochures, why do I still feel compelled to return to this blog, especially since I left left Asia almost a year and a half ago?  And setting that aside for a moment, why haven't I gone ahead and done it already?

Well, I've been otherwise occupied. Since leaving Asia in August 2012, I worked teaching English to speakers of many other languages in the D.C. area, studied for and took the GREs, applied and was accepted to one of the top schools in the world for graduate studies in English (still not sure how that happened), packed up and moved 300+ miles away to live in new city in a whole other country, and had a semester of graduate school. And things aren't really slowing down. Second semester just started, so I might not be able to really commit to completing this blog for quite some time.

But here's the thing that bugs: those days in Southeast Asia are constantly lingering in my peripheral vision. I'll be reading some particularly dry literary criticism or waiting for the subway or falling asleep, and a scene will flash into my brain as if someone's holding a View-Master in front of my mind's eye. It's usually a place or event that didn't even make it into my leather-bound journal because it was banal at the time: buying fruit around the corner from my apartment, or biking through the alleys of Sakon Nakhon, or riding the bus on the way out of town, heading south for Bangkok through the low Phu Phan mountains. Without effort it all returns with startling clarity, and suddenly I'm looking out the window of a bus climbing the winding road through the national park, glimpsing the miniature houses built as apologies to the forest spirits for the impositions of pavement and traffic, the night falling until all that's left to see are the mountain-bright stars and flashes of the open homes of the odd roadside village. And there's an ache that comes with it, a pull, a tugging towards warm, humid nights and bright flowers and clothes and the helpless laughter that is released by the struggle to communicate without words.

And just the other day, after shouldering the sturdy backpack I bought myself for Christmas, I was trudging through the snow towards the subway and absent-mindedly grabbed for the cheap digital watch that hangs from my right shoulder strap to check the time. And then I remembered that the watch had been looped on the strap of my backpacking bag, not this brand new fashionable one, and that I had given that watch to a Cambodian boy somewhere between Kampot and Kep. He liked the stopwatch feature.

I'm having a new sort of adventure now, and I love it. But I really miss those places and people and interactions, all of it, terribly. And I think that writing about it will make it feel like it isn't 8,000 miles away as the crow flies, and will lead me to remember things that I didn't bother to note in that battered journal. Because every moment of that time is standing by, waiting to be nudged into remembrance by a familiar sensation or unfurled with the tendrils of my mind as it opens to sleep. But maybe not for much longer.

Hue, Finally

From Ninh Binh I hopped on a night bus to head south to Hue.

If you catch a night bus in Thailand, you're stuck on a regular bus with seat back that reclines slightly, and that's where you're sleeping. Deal with it. In Vietnam, however, they have sleeping buses that look like this:

At first look you might think, "Well, shucks, that looks mighty comfortable" (or perhaps something along those lines that sounds less something from a story by Flannery O'Connor). Well, it is and it isn't. There's some leg room, but it's built to Asian standards, so some of my taller, lankier friends really suffered on these rides. The buses honk constantly to announce their presence on the dark road, so unless you packed earplugs, you'll be woken up every 20-30 seconds. There's nowhere to put a bag if you aren't willing to toss it in the compartment under the bus, which I never was with my small, if-you-lose-this-you-are-at-sea backpack that held my passport and kindle and wallet. The Vietnamese also seem to have a real problem with motion sickness: I took bus trips in every country I went to, and even though I crossed much rougher terrain in worse buses in Laos, Vietnam was where I repeatedly found myself sitting next to people retching into bags. Good times.

This was the only overnight bus I ever took in Vietnam (for reasons that will be made clear). It was almost completely full when I stepped on, and as the lone Westerner I was pointed to the rear of the bus where there are three couches in a row, as you can vaguely see in this photo. Someone was already vomiting in the bathroom, separated from the row of beds by a thin wall. It was made clear to me that I was to stretch out on the middle bench next to an older man who was already couched on the wall side. This seemed a little uncomfortably intimate, but Southeast Asian men are reasonably respectful of Western women, and I was rolling with the punches, so I resigned myself to a sleepless night. I was arranging my things, settling in, until the middle-aged man who had been retching in the bathroom came out and sprawled on my other side, bracketing me between two strange men, one of whom clearly had issues with motion sickness.

With that, our cozy little arrangement had gone from uncomfortable to intolerable. I peered desperately around and saw that there was one lone bunk left in the middle of the bus, grabbed my stuff and wrestled my way into the aisle. People were speaking at me in Vietnamese and there was a plastic bag sitting on the bed, but to my eyes it was uninhabited and had no direct neighbors and was therefore mine. The bag belonged to the man sleeping in the middle bunk, who took it from me with a grumble, and I clambered up to stretch out solo instead of being spooned by two strange men. Success! I celebrated by rubbing antiperspirant on a bandanna and tying it around my face to mask the smell of vomit before going to sleep listening to The Quiet American on my kindle.

This experience taught me a very valuable travel lesson: make moves. Just do whatever you need to do, even if it seems like people are telling you that you aren't allowed. I don't know what the other riders were saying to me in Vietnamese, but once I claimed the bunk, they stopped saying it. Don't be shy. And don't take night buses.

After that less-than-restful night, I arrived in Hue, a city of just under a million inhabitants situated on the lovely Perfume River. It's almost halfway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

I lost the first day I was there to recovering from the overnight bus ride (which always happened after I took a night bus, and sort of defeated the whole reason for taking a night bus in the first place). But on my second day I went to the Imperial City, which was built in 1804 and was home to the last emperors of Vietnam until the Vietnamese Revolutionary Government broke that party up in 1945.

To gain entrance to the Imperial City, one passes over the moat:

and through Ngo Mon gate, which was built in 1833. Of the five passageways that cut through the massive building, the middle entrance was reserved for the emperor. The two adjacent passages were for mandarins (minsters or counselors).

There are two hidden side entrances for soldiers, horses, elephants, and other riff-raff, like contemporary tourists.

The gate served as a viewing stage for events such as the promulgation of the lunar calendar (an annual event) or abdicating the throne (not at all annual).

Once through the gate I crossed over the Trung Dao Bridge to take a look at the Palace of Supreme Harmony. And it's at this point that I stop noting what exactly I'm looking at, and this blog post disintegrates into unnamed halls and palaces and temples. 

The Imperial City in Hue was built as a sort of an architectural echo of the Forbidden City in Beijing. This palace in particular is analogous to the Palace of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, but the Vietnamese version here is two stories instead of three, in deference to the Chinese Emperor. I'm not even going to try to pretend to understand the complicated relationship between Vietnam and China on this blog, because I have no idea what I'm talking about. My limited understanding is that the Chinese occupied Vietnam for a thousand years starting in 111 B.C., brutally quashed any rebellions, and served as both a model and a threat to the Vietnamese. Vietnamese culture is certainly informed by Chinese culture, but the Vietnamese are very resentful of the Chinese. That's all I've gathered.

Here are some more pretty photos!

A hall or palace or something

roof detail

Pagoda

Americans are pretty lazy about the aesthetics of our gutters. Make an effort, people!

Honestly, this place went on and on.

I did note that this building, the Hien Lam Pavilion, was "erected between 1821-1822 [as] a memorial for the...meritorious mandarins for their outstanding contributions to the dynasty". And who do we think commissioned this building? I'm thinking it was a wee bit self-congratulatory. Nice choice of color, though.

The Imperial City at Hue used to look like this:

But in between all those amazing buildings pictured above, a lot of it looks like this:

And this:

The Imperial City really isn't old enough for the passage of time to be responsible for this kind of damage.  The destruction is partly due to bombing by the French in the 1940's and the U.S. in the '60's. But the city was really reduced to ruin when it was caught in the center of the Tet Offensive of 1968.

The Tet Offensive was a massive, countrywide assault that took place when the North Vietnamese broke a ceasefire called for the popular week-long New Year's holiday of Tet, and launched strategic attacks all over the country while fully half of the South Vietnamese soldiers were on leave for the New Year. The North Vietnamese attacked, occupied, and dug in at the urban center of Hue (among other places), so that the resulting battle stretched from January 30 to March 3 in one of the bloodiest and longest fights of the Vietnam War.  When the Siege of Hue ended, 5,113 North Vietnamese, 384 South Vietnamese, and 216 Americans had been killed in the fighting, with another 2,687 Americans wounded.  These tremendous American losses and injuries took some of the wind out of the sails of the American public's perception of the war, and political support for further action in Vietnam started to wane.

Just a note: as the North Vietnamese captured, occupied, and withdrew from Hue, they also found the time to commit the Hue Massacre. They killed between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war who were perceived as sympathetic to the southern Vietnamese government or the Americans. When the victims were unearthed they were found bound, tortured, and some seemed to have been buried alive. This has little to do with my visit to the Imperial City, but I feel it should be noted, in addition to marveling over the architecture.

In any case, the Imperial City is a UNESCO Heritage cite, and they're working hard on restoring it.
And really, the gardens in the center look pretty good:

And I actually enjoy the abandoned, decaying aesthetic. I think it adds a certain something.

It's like The Secret Garden, but in Vietnam.