The Imperial City in Hue, Vietnam
If we waited for the sun to shine, we would never have seen the most impressive sites in Hue. While the rest of Vietnam has two seasons, rainy and dry, the central region surrounding this intriguingly historic city has its own: wet and wetter. Undaunted by the dire weather report for our five-day stay and eager to explore the royal realms of the Nguyen Dynasty, we armored up with newly-purchased plastic ponchos and umbrellas and set out into the mist.
This was more than a meal. It was a rebuttal.
Any hopes we had of drying out after we left rainy Hoi An were quickly dashed. Our next destination has a reputation for notoriously bad weather, and in that regard Hue, Vietnam, more than exceeded our expectations.
In addition to the unrelenting cold and rain, the city also greeted us with a dose of unexpected irony. We had literally just pushed the print button on an article calling false every bad thing we had heard about Vietnam. Instead of the unfriendly and unscrupulous people we had been told to expect, everyone we actually met was exceedingly warm and helpful.
I guess we should have known that bad things happen when you tempt the Fates because it was the very next day that we boarded a bus to Hue.
Head to Hoi An’s Central Market for the town’s best Cau Lao
Hoi An, as I mentioned earlier, was somewhat unkind to us. But it wasn’t just the rain. In addition to dodging drops we also had a terrible time finding good places to eat, let alone great ones.
Partly, I think we just got spoiled in Hanoi. It was so easy to find delicious meals in Hanoi that almost anywhere else would seem a disappointment by comparison. And so it was initially with Hoi An.
Don’t get us wrong, Hoi An is a lovely city. But it really is a tourist town. Unfortunately, many of its eateries reflect that. Too many cater to what they think westerners want and serve up mediocre food at inflated prices as a result.
In the past we’ve been able to side-step tourist cuisine by avoiding the places where tourists eat. But in Hoi An, that strategy didn’t always work. We had bad experiences at upscale places as well as downscale ones and everywhere in between.
Through sheer persistence, and a week of trying, we did eventually uncover these handful of standouts.
Our most recent purchase – a fatter passport
There’s something vaguely exciting about the blank visa pages contained within my passport. As much as I love the stamps documenting where I’ve been, it’s those empty visa spaces where all the possibilities reside; each one bursting with promises of travel stories as yet untold but yearning to be written.
Recently, though, we’ve been burning through our blank visa pages like rolling papers at a Colorado ski resort. The truth is that we’re traveling more these days than our passports were designed to accommodate. It’s a high class problem for sure. But it is a problem nonetheless. And one that we suddenly realized we’d need to deal with before we can board the flight we already booked to Greece this spring.
The good news is that the U.S. government allows its citizens to add up to 72 blank pages to their passports. The bad news is that they make doing so an unnecessarily ridiculous ass-ache.
Hoi An was unkind to us in a way. We knew we were visiting this central Vietnamese city near the end of its rainy season, but with a week to spend in the relatively small town we figured we had more than enough time to see and do everything. We were wrong. The rain was nearly relentless for seven straight days.
Everywhere Once 