Following Hoi An, our next destination was supposed to be Hue. The problem was, weirdly enough, navigating the transportation options to get from one city to the next, as they were roughly 3 hours away from each other. The issue is that there were several highly recommended sites to visit between the cities – Marble Mountain, Hai Van Pass and Elephant Springs – so we had to figure out how to squeeze them into our commute. We looked into bus options, but there were none that would stop at those places on the way to Hue. The most popular approach is to rent a motorbike and cover the sites at your own leisure, but Jess wasn’t too keen on that option. [Editor’s note: Plus, we’d have all our stuff with us, which would mean each having our own motorbike instead of me riding on the back. A whole bunch of nope.] Finally, it didn’t make any sense to do a tour from Hoi An to see those attraction, have it return us to Hoi An and then to book separate transportation to Hue. That’d be inefficient and everyone knows I hate inefficiency.
Our solution to this conundrum was to rent a private car and driver to take us from Hoi An to Hue while stopping at each of those locations – a bit of a pricey option (roughly $60 total), but at least it’d ensure that we were able to do everything we wanted. Our chatty driver arrived early on the requisite morning and whisked us away on the journey, which proved to be as seamless and convenient as we had hoped. Our first stop was a destination called Marble Mountain, which is not too far outside of Danang – the largest city in central Vietnam. Marble Mountain, as you likely guessed from the name, is a mountain where marble is procured and which is notable for having some interesting caves and pagodas on top that you can hike around and visit. Prior to exploring the top of the mountain, our driver took us to “Marble Village” which is a set of shops that sell incredibly expensive statues and figurines carved out of marble that were for sale. Simultaneously gaudy and beautiful, we were able to witness locals carving some statues without blowing half our travel budget on marble items. [Editor’s note: We also spent a while wondering about who the customers are – there were 8-foot-tall marble animal statues which were very nice, but who comes to Central Vietnam and then pays to ship something like that back home to wherever? I mean, I guess some people do or it wouldn’t exist, but it seemed like a strange product for a roadside tourist shop to specialize in.]
A woman carves a marble statue at Marble Mountain
Part of the giant loading dock at the marble statue store
Marble Mountain itself was simultaneously interesting and not interesting, if that makes sense (it probably doesn’t and, frankly, probably shouldn’t). The first amusing thing is that it was absolutely swarming with Chinese tourists, which induced a PTSD reaction in us as we remembered the loud, crowded settings we endured throughout our time in China. Beyond that, the pagodas and most of the caves on the mountain were meh. They were nice, but nothing too special. They at least had a view of the ocean, which is pretty quaint. The real charmer, however, was a single cave that we visited on top of the mountain (the name escapes me, but is unimportant). The first cavern had a large statue of Buddha inside which was nice, but the feature that put it over the top was a massive subsequent cavern that had a partial natural opening at the top that allowed some beautiful streams of light to burst inside, illuminating the intricate altars below. It was really beautiful and calming, while also giving Jess an opportunity to obsess for 20 minutes about how best to capture the scene with her camera (including forcing me to “pose” in various settings).
How beautiful is this? Totally worth it.
Rorie could work on his “casual pose,” don’t you think?
Impressive dragon carvings at Marble Mountain
Our next stop was the Hai Van Pass, which is just an extremely scenic road that wraps around the mountain and provides picturesque views of the bay and ocean. This route is often touted as one of the most beautiful roads in the world and it was fairly easy to see why. We rode it all the way to the highest point of the mountain, where our driver pulled over so that we could take pictures. We hiked up a nearby hill to take pictures and started snapping away until, without warning, and incredibly heavy fog started flowing over the mountain (on the side where we hadn’t been) and rapidly obscured the beautiful views that we had just been viewing. We went from a perfect day on Hai Van Pass to a useless one where we couldn’t see anything, all in the span of literally 5 minutes. We were lucky that we were able to enjoy it for a while and snap some pictures before that set in – our timing was impeccable!
Hai Van Pass and the ocean
After descending Hai Van Pass, our driver took us to a random lunch spot on the waterfront of a lagoon. As we drove up, I made eye contact with a western gal seated at a table there and we smiled at each other in the “friendly but whatever” kind of way that one does in that scenario. But as we parked the car I looked over and noticed the gentleman that was sitting with her – he had a shaved head, a beard and he totally looked familiar. It was Jason and Andrea, an American couple that we met and ate dinner with in Chengdu, China a couple months earlier! In an incredibly fortuitous turn of events, they just happened to be at the same obscure restaurant at the same time, all without any planning! It was extremely rewarding to see them again and to be able to catch up on their travels. It was arguably the highlight of my day and a cool situation where our travels came full circle in an extremely pleasant way.
Fishing boats and nets outside of our lunch restaurant
Following lunch, we made our way down a bumpy side road to the final sight of our journey, Elephant Springs. We had read favorable reviews about this and received multiple recommendations from friends who had previously visited Vietnam, with each claiming that it was a beautiful area with natural springs where it’s fun to explore and go swimming. With this in mind, we were shocked to pull up and find a completely abandoned, borderline destroyed area where there was not a single other visitor or local. All the booths were damaged, there was trash strewn everywhere and it was generally just super creepy and weird. We wandered around for a while like CSI detectives just trying to figure out what the hell was going on, but eventually shrugged our shoulders and headed back to our car to get the hell out of there. We ran into some western couples on the way out and they said that it may have something to do with this being the end of the rainy season in Vietnam, so the water levels are too high for visitors for a few months. Perhaps that’s true. We still don’t know. It was just weird, no matter how you wanna look at it.
Part of the trashed, deserted Elephant Springs. So strange.
After all of that, we finally arrived at our hostel in Hue, Vietnam. The city was the former capital of Vietnam and is best known for having a palace that is comparable in significance/nature to the Forbidden City in Beijing, as well as several notable tombs of emperors that are cool to visit via a bike or boat. But quite frankly, we got there and just weren’t feeling it. Those attractions didn’t sound terribly interesting to us, the city itself was fine (but not special in any respect), Jess was starting to get sick and we ended up being there right at the beginning of several days of continuous rain. Therefore, we decided to spend our 3 days there doing absolutely, positively nothing, which was truly lovely. We watched a bunch of Netflix, caught up on this blog a bit, did research for forthcoming legs of our trip and, generally speaking, didn’t allow ourselves to feel guilty in the slightest about effectively “skipping” this city. You can’t win ‘em all and sometimes you just need a break from your vacation, so this provided us the perfect opportunity for that. We concluded our time in Hue by catching a bus to Phong Nha, a national park with an expansive series of caves that we were super excited to visit and explore for several days!
[Editor’s note: So, would I recommend any of this to others? It’s honestly hard to say. While driving over the pass was nice, I wouldn’t say it was a must-do activity, and similarly I felt that we could have skipped Marble Mountain given that we’d seen so many pagodas, altars, and the like on other parts of our travels. Though, if Vietnam is your only destination, it might be a lot more unique and cool! Elephant Springs was a definite skip for me, though I do think it was just the wrong season and so I grant that I have no idea what it’s supposed to be like – so essentially we paid for a nice air conditioned car and seeing our friends for lunch…not too shabby! Hue was certainly fine to skip as well (given that we didn’t actually see any of it, this very well might be a flawed perspective), so all in all I guess I wouldn’t recommend any of it. For me, Hoi An is the last town I’d recommend before the caves at Phong Nha.]
No, not pregnant – just zipping my raincoat over my day pack on my stomach while keeping my main pack dry with the rain cover simultaneously. This was Hue for us.
