www.la-residence-hue.com "I sit and sip and stare and understand why the hotel (MGallery La Residence Hue Hotel & Spa) has made the Conde Nast hot list and Reader's Awards, the Travel and Leisure top hotels lists, and won Hideaway Report's Grand Award. All this to say it's really the only place from which to base your excursions into Vietnam's last city of kings."

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VIETNAM APRIL 2016
ORANGE
Inside the Oscar-Nominated Film
Chau, Beyond the Lines
PAGE18
SO, WHAT'S YOUR POINT?
Healing With Pins and Needles
PAGE32
THE SCENT OF
GREEN PAPAYA SALAD
New Isan Thai Restaurant Opens
PAGE60
HUE AWAY
The Glory of the
Former Imperial Capital
PAGE78
SAIGONCity on the Verge

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Travel & LeisureIMAGE BY PATRICK CARPENTER

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GREAT ESCAPES: HUE
I REMEMBER
EVERYTHING
I remember it took six steps to cross the
balcony to lean on the white ledge to look
across the river and through the palm
trees to the citadel where the flag was
undulating carelessly. The sky was the
gray blue that comes after the rain and
before the humidity. The wind came and
went, came and went, and on it was the
muffled chugging of the engines of the
long boats sauntering against the current.
Songbirds flitted through the palms and
three boys came through the vegetable
garden with covered bamboo cages and
sat silently, staring up in a futile attempt
to figure how to trap them. Time passed.
Hue Away
THE GLORY OF THE FORMER IMPERIAL CAPITAL
STILL RESONATES LONG AFTER YOU’VE LEFT THE CITY
TEXT AND IMAGES BY PATRICK CARPENTER

5. 79
There were no horns, just an occasional human voice:
“I thought he said he was in 104...”
“…downstairs in thirty minutes...”
“Wir sehen uns spaeter?”
And the infrequent opening and closing of solid
doors. The pool to the left on the grounds was the
cleanest Caribbean blue, salted and undisturbed. Over
the thick white low wall that separated the pool, the
garden and the grounds from the river, one of the
hotel’s chefs was cutting off banana leaves to be used to
accent the plates that went out of the kitchen at noon.
Women were walking single file and talking down the
narrow path to the tourist and fishing boats. It was
still morning, but the guests booked on the early flight
had already departed and the residence was peaceful,
contented.
I walked back inside the room and scanned the
handwritten welcome note. Who takes the time to write
by hand? I cut into one of the mangos in the basket
on the bureau, slicing it sideways along its spine and
dicing it into cubes. The room and the open balcony
were quiet enough to hear the knife cutting through
the sinews. It may have been the best mango I had ever
tasted. Great meals make great memories, but can you
make a memory of just one slice? Stop now all that is
spinning inside your head and just realize how good
this is. The city can wait. The itinerary can wait. The
day is still ahead. There is enough time for everything.
But now give into all the subtle variations of flavor in
this singular fruit. I ate the first half on the bed and the
second half over the sink as the juice ran down my arm.
I raked the skin and the seed with my teeth. I thought,
‘Who buries the best possible version of a fruit in a
fully loaded basket in the far corner room on the first
floor of a hotel on an unexceptional guest reservation?’
Is it generosity?
The residence I am remembering is La Residence
Hue Hotel & Spa, the city of Hue’s grand hotel. It is
part of Accor’s MGallery universe and your reward
for reaching the middle of Vietnam. The M is for
Memorable, and MGallery hotels are the pride of
Accor, distinguished by their settings, their history,
their design, their character. La Residence is named
obviously: it was the official residence of the French
colonial governor. Its grandest rooms are named for
noteworthy personalities that graced the building in its first
life, and these persons are noted in biographies along the
long halls. If anything, they seem to confirm the elegance
of the building in their portraits. Who knows if they lived
grander or loved deeper than we do now, but they certainly
saw to their days with enough savoir-faire to live up to
the building’s dramatic Art Deco styling. Rounded rooms,
high ceilings and wraparound foyers – it all brings to mind
the best days of the ocean liner and the grandest theatres.
The hotel sits with pride of place on Le Loi, resplendent in
white and set back deep in its berth. The entrance flows
from a circular graveled driveway and into a lounge,
because a good host knows what his guests want before
they admit it. Straight ahead is the broad, well-stocked bar
backlit by the sun. The ceiling is a structured sunburst, with
support beams radiating outwards towards the pool. I sit
and sip and stare and understand why the hotel has made
the Conde Nast hot list and Reader’s Awards, the Travel and
Leisure top hotels lists, and won Hideaway Report’s Grand
Award. All this to say it’s really the only place from which
to base your excursions into Vietnam’s last city of kings.

6. 80
I remember stopping early that first full
day on a street along a canal that fed into the
Perfume River. Each house a different style
from a different era, and seemingly every other
house an outdoor café. Vietnam’s history and
her habits are here in plain sight. Trees along
the banks of the canal that must have seen
emperors, foreign emissaries, a student who
would grow up to lead the country, soldiers
local and foreign, and finally peace. Sitting
for coffee just after sunrise, my guide asks
about a particular antiqued gate down the
alleyway. A conversation ensues, pulling in
the surrounding tables. Being out of the loop,
I sip the black bitterness and think of the
advice of Walker Evans: “Stare. It is the way to
educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen,
eavesdrop…You are not here long.” We get up
to get going, to cross over the bridge and go
through the walls of the Citadel and she tells
me the modest man modestly dressed that she
was talking to was distant royalty and the gate
was once an entrance to royal grounds. This
little note settles in while I pedal past a steady
line of men all fishing in the moat surrounding
the Imperial City. So it goes here, with the
blending of the opulent and the modest, the
past and the present sharing the same wall.
Unlike Vietnam’s big three, Hue is not in
a rush to reinvent its visual identity. Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City are demolishing their
physical past at breakneck speed, and Da
Nang’s rapid development means it can no
longer be overlooked in favor of the political
capital to the north and the economic capital
to the south. But Hue has the good fortune of
being fewer than 100 kilometers from Da Nang
and yet in a world all its own, a world where
there is still time, there are still sidewalks for
walking, there is still a river you can actually
swim in, there are still houses with gardens
and lotus ponds that bring the good fortune in
and walls to keep the bad fortune out. There
are vestiges of the past everywhere, and not all
its history is cast in cement or clay.

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I remember everything, but some things
more than others. In the Forbidden City, the
painted phoenixes of the queen’s gate, the
bas relief of the dragons for the king, yes, but
strikingly, the small relief of a multi-colored
toad at the bottom of one gate. Who could
guess that lowly toad would be there to greet
the royal family? Leaving the palace grounds,
I remember overhearing a tour guide tell two
Indian men that his parents used to make him
kneel on the skin of jackfruit when he was
naughty. Who could ever find such a use for
one skin against another? I remember much
more: The somberness of the tombs of Tu
Duc and Minh Mang, coming at the end of
otherwise splendid grounds. The students in
white ao dai hurrying into blood red French
colonial buildings where Ho Chi Minh went
to school and were now the pride of Hue. The
metal swans bobbing beside the riveted bridge
shaped like a comb that stretched over the river
that flowed underneath like hair. The cup of
mixed fruit and the sifter of apple juice placed
on my table after my afternoon swim in the
hotel pool, and the locals who still swim out
every morning from the riverbanks, swimming
around the nets of the fishermen in their
skinny wooden boats. I remember the hint of
orange in the marinated pan-fried prawns and
the young rice ice cream from the six-course
alfresco dinner beside the hotel pool. The
‘honeymoon’ bedroom of the mandarin who
bought a garden house from a princess. It was
no larger than two square meters, no higher
than three meters. Even given the fact that
people were smaller a century ago, this was
no more than a closet and a challenge to even
the least claustrophobic of lovers. I remember
packing slowly but being driven away by the
taxi rather quickly – a sign that my time in
such a city, such a residence, was now turning
into memory.
I remember it all. Because everything about
it was memorable.