This is my 4th day in Hue, a former Imperial City in central Vietnam. Hue was the center of heavy fighting during the Tet Offensive in 1968. In fact, the first evening I had dinner with an old Marine who had fought here. He pointed outside and said we fought house to house right up this street. Two days ago I took a day tour to Phong Nha Cave. It was interesting for both the amazing formations and because the cave is reached by boat. At the entrance they cut the engines and rowed us far back into the cave. In this area a large variety of crops are farmed, often in neat, patchwork little fields but sometimes in large plantations that are machine cultivated. Crops I know of include rice, tapioca, peanuts, coffee, black pepper, corn, watermelon, bananas, coconut, rubber, pine pitch, and taro. Yesterday I did the DMZ tour. We saw the Ho Chi Minh Trail, now much changed of course. We also saw the Khe Sanh combat base. There was an extreme amount propaganda put on the photo captions. We toured the Vinh Moc tunnel system and must have walked a half mile underground. These tunnels were large enough for the Vietnamese to have walked upright but us westerners still had to stoop. The last photo shows the crazy traffic and how a two lane road is often treated as four lanes, including water buffalo.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 23:12:26 +0000
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