I arrived to Hue on a sunny day of March 14, 2025 A.C.
Mate and Dju were going to follow me later on in the day, and in the meantime I settled down in a beautiful 4-storey Riverside Villa with a magnificent view on the river and town.
Just to note, the host at the villa also served the BEST pancakes I have tried in my life – lemon, pineapple, passion fruit or banana, you choose. The only downfall was that the portion of 1 pancake is not enough to feed any backpacker. As a representative of this curious species, I can solemnly swear it is true.
Most of my memories can be encompassed by the first three days at Hue, because what happened next sucks but is far from being exciting.
As always, my chronology may be f*cked up a bit, so pardon your storyteller her memory of a 100 year old senior with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and whatever else you could add to that illness collection.
On our first day we did not plan much, and ended up passing by at least 5 restaurants, moaning about how hungry we are in the meantime. Finally sitting down at one of them, we ordered some Vietnamese soup (bahn beo hue, maybe??) with a bahn mi (Vietnamese “subway” sandwich; to all Vietnamese reading this, please do not throw rotten durian at me for this comparison). After having a chat and exchanging favorite songs on Mate’s speaker, Dju went back to the hostel, and me and Mate took a bicycle cart (or whatever its called) to the DMZ bar around the corner, effectively bringing down the ride price from 150,000 dong to just 50,000.
For those who do not know, DMZ in Vietnam stands for De-Militarized Zone.
We came there determined to find someone else and have a good time chatting and drinking beer. Little did I know!
I mean, it was soooo fun. We met an Australian couple and had an amazing 3-4 hour conversation, ordering a couple of beer towers (oh, yeah) and smoking White Horse (go on, judge me!). I started to feel carried away, but sobered up pretty quickly by the end of the night, especially because Mate was carried away much further and by far stronger winds than me. We headed back home, with me trying to sit him in the taxi and then drag him out of the river, AND trying not to fall there myself too.
Poor hostess at our villa, I have not realized she was waiting for us. I made it to my room, but Mate slept in a camping chair in the common area on the second floor.
Next day we headed to Imperial Palace (see 360 vid here), which took us around 2 hours to complete, and 200,000 dong to enter (rip off!). I am not even sure what was prettier – the ancient walls of the palace, so detailed and decorated fancy enough to compete with fantastic architecture works in Nikko Toshogu in Japan – or the Vietnamese tourists dressed in national clothing, and taking pictures around.
It was terribly hot, and we stopped at the cool KFC to eat and play UNO with a sweet girl named Sophia from the UK, who did medicine in one of the schools there. Since it was Dju’s BD the next day, we got some other folks from the hotel, including Kevin and Bobby, who travelled together on motorbikes, back to the DMZ bar. A couple of other folks joined, for example their friends Vanessa and Annika.
Bruh, that was wild.
We waited till midnight to raise Dju in a chair 3 times. At that point we finished 6 beer towers, danced on the chairs (not on the tables, since those were already occupied by the dancing beer towers), spit out the bottle caps, and overall just lost our dignity in the most fun way possible.
I was not able to get as drunk as I wanted, as I could not stop counting the amount of money spent on the beer tower, and that math sobered me up every time. Can’t be thankful enough to Bobby for doing the big gesture and covering our bill, however.
These couple of days were so intense that by next morning my social battery was depleted as much as it could possibly be, and even more. Who am I to say no to some fun though? Me and Vanessa went to see the Tu Duc Toms, the one before-last-one Emperor of pre-colonial Vietnam, and then shopped around to get her the pants and hoodie for the loop in Hanoi. Some of the vendors at the market were so desperate that I had to hold Vanessa’s hand and the vendor’s hand, pulling them apart. Others did not even care to bargain.
I forgot to mention it was raining the whole day, and by end of the day I started feeling the small fever but thought nothing much of it.
Next morning we went to the abandoned waterpark, and that’s when I used my last Advil pill to feel more or less okay. Ever wondered why people with fever look like they are high on something?..
I feel like most of the attractions there were disassembled and taken away, as we only found a huge dragon-shaped building, waterslide, and some weird van, elevated at 1.5 meters above the ground. I hugely recommend going there with friends, as playing Bella Ciao from your speaker in a huge stone dragon in a group is fun; doing it alone is kinda creepy.
That night my ancestors visited me. It was cold, then hot, then cold again. My thoughts were wondering around, and I felt lost in my blanket, life, earth, and space. Surprisingly, the fever and all the illness was absolutely gone the next morning… I wonder how high my body temperature went on that night, but whatever the virus was torturing me, it probably killed it.
As abrupt as it is, I am finishing my Hue blog on this optimistic note. It was raining cats and dogs all the remaining week I was in Hue. To add on the melancholy, our group also started falling apart like my life. Dju left for Phong Nha. Then Mate went back to Da Nang, and Lalit followed him there.
I also left, looking back many times. Life’s a tricky thing, innit?
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