Chua Huong (Perfume Pagoda)

In Vietnamese, Chua means pagoda while Den means temple. Chua generally is associated with Buddhist while Den is for worshipping ancestors. And in Vietnam, there are many pagodas and temples. In fact, all villages have at least one temple.

Towards the end of my nine-month stay in Ha Noi, my foreign friends and myself made a final field trip to Chua Huong in Ha Tay province. Located about 70km south of Ha Noi, Perfume Pagoda is one of the most popular pagodas in Vietnam. The festival of the pagoda is one of the longest, stretching from Feb to late-Apr each year. It is said that all Vietnamese endeavour to visit the pagoda once in their lifetime.

Well, after studying basic Vietnamese for close to nine-month, I eagerly look forward to my trip. The three of us (Chinese Huang Min and Thai Weerapan) made our trip on a Sunday. Through her contact, Huang Min managed to arrange for a taxi (engaged for a day) for the three of us. We started off from our school in Hoai Duc District at about 0700H. From our school, the taxi headed towards the provincial capital of Ha Dong before taking Highway 1 for the journey to our wharf for our boat trip to the pagoda.

At about 0900H, we reached Ben Duc pier. There were not much crowd there as the festival had ended a fortnight earlier. We had to pay a little more to get a boat specially for the three of us. According to our boatwoman, most of the inhabitants at Ben Duc are involved in the tourism business and each boat owner are limited to one trip every month (or three month. I cannot recollect exactly). The boat ride took us about one and a half hour.

I have not been to the famous Guilin in Chinese but I was told that the scenery along Yen Vi river to Perfume Pagoda is not unlike that of Guilin. Upon reaching the foot of the mountain leading to Perfume Pagoda, we made our way to our first destination Thien Tru Temple (Den Thien Tru). Thereafter, we made our way to the cable car station for our accent to Perfume Pagoda as we did not want to make the difficult trip up. The trip up by cable car allowed us to enjoy the wonderful limestone outcrops formation in the region. Fortunately for us, it started drizzling after we reached Perfume Pagoda.

When we reached the entrance to the pagoda, I was surprised to find that we have to descend to a large cavern. This reminder me of a similar religious complex I had visited 14 years ago in Thailand's Petchburi province. There were many worshippers at the pagoda and we were told that no meat items are allowed as offerings.

After spending some time there, we decided to make our descend to the boat pier for our trip back. By the time we returned to Ben Duc, it was almost 1630 in the evening.