We’ve travelled south about 700km from the capital, and have spent the past few days hanging out in Hue, historic city of the Nguyen dynasty, feudal capital and UNESCO world heritage site. After the damp and overcast conditions in Hanoi, the weather is hot and gloriously sunny, which isn’t really much of shock given the geography and the distance we’ve travelled. We’re staying in Villa Hue, a very modern and quite luxurious hotel, enthusiastically staffed by students from Hue Tourism School.

We’ve been taking it easy during our stay here, wandering around the various palaces and temples absorbing the history and architecture. We spent our first full day at Hue Citadel, a sprawling complex of royal retreats, temples and houses on the bank of the Perfume River. Comparable in stature (but perhaps not scale or sheer beauty) to places like Angkor Wat, there’s a considerable effort being made to restore parts of the place to it’s former glory, some of which has fallen into ruin or completely destroyed by war.

We organised a guided tour for our second day, sailing up the Perfume River to the stunning Thien Mu Pagoda, then continuing on to a number of the Royal Tombs of Hue, gorgeously landscaped retreats and temples dedicated to the greatness and reflecting the personalities of Vietnamese emperors past.

Through all the grandeur and royal heritage, Hue itself appears to be a fairly nondescript but modern(ish), low-rise city. Life here is far more sedate here than our previous port of call (with the traffic being only *slightly* mad), and the streets are clean. It’s a perfectly comfortable base to go temple-hopping.