Saigon-Hue #1

Mosaic at the tomb of Tu Duc

For my third trip to Vietnam, we took the Christmas week to travel from Saigon to Hue and back (with a stop in Daneng/Hoi An on the way) by train. It was great to have the chance to spend some time in Vietnam outside of its busting cities (Saigon IS 'bustling' incarnate), to see some of its breathtaking scenery, and to visit some of its historic cultural site, from both the pre-colonial and French periods.

While Cambodia certainly has the more impressive ruins in terms of scale and grandeur, Vietnam (the southern half, at least) offers visitors more intimate and contemplative relics that are perhaps more closely connected to our current world than Angkor Wat is. They are also much more recent...many of the sites we visited dated from the late 18th and 19th centuries, a period of which almost nothing has survived in Cambodia.

I was also struck by how very different Vietnam from the rest of mainland Southeast Asia. Whereas Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar all share a common religion and related tongues, Vietnam has its own mix of religious traditions and influences (Confucianism and characters from China, Catholicism and romanticized alphabet from the French). The iconography, temple layouts, and even color schemes are quite different (Cambodians have an affinity for acid pinks and pastel yellows, whereas Vietnamese seem to prefer cooler earth tones). 

My favorite historical place we visited is the tomb of Tu Duc, with low rise temples and courtyards set among serpentine canals and tree-lined hills. While apparently much of the art work from these sites was pillaged long ago, I was still drawn to ceramic-plate mosaics that ornamented many of the outer walls.