Glazed tiles all over the place! That was the first thing that struck me when entering the Citadel. Not only the common Chinese yellow roof tiles but also a kind of porcelain mosaics that I had never encountered before - fragments of blue & white vases that have been put together to form new designs on the outer walls of buildings and gates.

The Citadel is a pleasantly quiet place to walk around for a couple of hours. It's a very busy site near the entrance gate, but I was almost on my own at the back of the complex and at the fringes. My favourite building here was the Truong San Residence, with its great yellow entrance gate. This and most of the other objects look very recently painted and/or restored. Over-restored maybe, I wonder what our Forum would have to say about this one.

A visit to the Hué monuments is not complete without seeing some of the places outside the city. For that, I rented a bicycle and set off south. The first kilometers out of Hué are easygoing. Every 10 minutes or so there's an interesting stop - I visited Nam Giao esplanade, heard the monks chanting at the very peaceful Tu Hieu pagoda, and joined the busloads of tour groups again at the Tomb of Tu Duc. There is a "Tomb" here (though empty), but it actually was more of a country house & pleasure park for the emperor. It still is a grand place which takes about an hour to visit.

After that, I had planned to visit some more tombs. But the road quickly deteriorated, the signposting got more erratic, the sun warmer and the hills higher. At one moment I even found myself and my bicycle on the very dusty AH1 highway between Hanoi and Saigon. When I encountered a turn with the sign "Hué 10 km", I quickly decided to turn back and be pleased with the things I had managed to see that day.