Too much boom-boom

Thursday 12 December

I decided to walk up to one of the tombs – Tu Duc. A slightly eccentric way to go there but it gave me a chance to see a bit more of the real Hue and proved an interesting walk as I passed and had a brief look at several temples and pagodas on the way. The Tu Duc tomb complex itself is a bit run down and didn’t strike me as really comparable to the citadel. The way of presenting the tombs themselves is quite sobering. You walk up a flight of steps to a courtyard with stone soldiers; then there’s a building with a giant stele, then up more steps to a screen to a walled area with the lonely tomb in the middle.

Afterwards, I accepted a motorbike taxi ride back to the hotel from the husband of a lady who’d lined me up as I was arriving and was still hanging around about two hours later when I came to leave. In fact, he drove very slowly and it was a good way to get back.

In the evening I went out to the well-recommended Queen restaurant which I discovered had been renamed.  Goodness knows why you’d rename somewhere that has a good name.

There and back there were the usual pestering pimps offering nice ladies and boom-boom. For me, the amount of hassle in Hue tips over from faintly amusing to a bloody nuisance and with one of them I threatened to call the police which seemed to have the desired effect.

However, my humour was redeemed by the cute dogs that greeted me in my room.