Pause for lunch at a hand-picked local restaurant featuring Hue’s signature dishes: an assortment of delicate steamed cakes (banh beo, banh nam, banh loc) and a hearty bowl of bun bo Hue, the city’s iconic spicy beef noodle soup. This is the lunch locals eat, not the buffet tour buses pull up to.

In the afternoon, visit the Tomb of Tu Duc, a poetic complex of pavilions, lakes, and pine forest where the scholar-king once wrote poetry, then the Tomb of Khai Dinh, a striking fusion of European and Vietnamese architecture covered in hand-laid ceramic and glass mosaic.

Drop-off at your Hue hotel by late afternoon.