Today we were off on a tour to My Son (pronounced "mee-suhn", not
"ma-sahn"!), a large Cham Temple site. The
Champa Kingdom lasted from the second to fifteenth centuries AD and
they are best known for the large brick towers they built, many of
which are found at the My Son site. We had decided to go on a tour
rather than travel independently and when the hotel said they could
arrange one for us yesterday we opted to go with them. We thought
that as a smart hotel it would be a small group tour but I should
have known better. The old adage “you get what you pay for”
certainly came true today and we got US$6 worth of tour.
The bus picked us up at eight in the morning with not many
people on board. The fact that it had seats that could fold down in
the aisle was another warning sign and by the time it left Hoi An it
was packed to capacity. Next to us was a British woman who seems to
have been teaching English as a foreign language in various
different places but is now cycling her way down through China and
Vietnam. It was not long before she was winding us both up and by
the end of the tour we were glad to see the back of her. She was one
of those people who has an opinion about everything and most of them
we disagreed with. Unfortunately, others were lapping up her advice
so I suspect there will be some who miss the best parts of a trip to
Halong Bay and others who will be paranoid about travelling in South
America. Contrary to our own experience she was convincing people
that it is a dodgy and dangerous place to be.
It was about an hour or so in the bus to get to My Son. The
drive was through pretty scenery with lots of rice fields lining the
road on either side. Along the way we were asked if we wanted to buy
our entrance tickets (60,000 dong each) ourselves or if we wanted to
give the money to the guide for him to get them for us. His spiel
was that there would be long queues and it would be quicker to get
him to buy the tickets for us. As it turned out this was total tosh
and we would have been better off being self sufficient.
The state of play worsened when he hopped off our bus and on
to another equally packed one, saying as he went that both bus loads
(over fifty people) would join together and go in one group around
the My Son site. When we finally got there we were dropped off at a
café about five hundred metres walk from the entrance. For no
explained reason, but to give us time to buy breakfast, we simply
hung around for about half an hour before heading towards the
entrance. We quickly realised that giving the guide our entrance
money was a big mistake. Those that had not were already ahead of us
and making their way into the site while we were hanging around. As
soon as we could we ditched the tour and made our own way.
About two hundred metres beyond the ticket office is a control
gate where they check you have a ticket. You then walk over a bridge
to where jeeps and minibuses run a shuttle service taking you one
and a half kilometres further up the road. You then walk a further
five hundred metres before you reach the site. All in all it was a
bit of a disorganised process for getting there and had we stayed
with the group it would have taken ages to get there.
The site is now simply ruins but in its day it must have been
a pretty incredible sight to see. It was mainly a religious site
dedicated to Cham kings who were in turn associated with Hindu
divinities. Archaeologists have found traces of 68 different
structures at the site. The site was occupied until the 13th
century and since then only 25 escaped without pillaging.
Unfortunately the Vietcong used My Son as a base during the American
War so it was bombed liberally by the US. Of the 25 non-pillaged
sites only 20 were spared damage from the bombs.
All in all it adds up to an atmospheric visit, if you can
block out the inevitable groups of tourists. The archaeologists have
not been very imaginative in their labelling of the site and have
simply clustered buildings together and called them group A, B, C
etc. Even though our guide book has brief descriptions of each of
the groups we couldn’t work out which group was which so quickly
ditched the book and just wandered around.
The buildings have all been made from red bricks, some of
which have intricate carvings on them. Apart from one group which is
cordoned off for safety reasons, you are free to amble around and on
top of all of the ruins. Considering it is a UNESCO World Heritage
site little seems to be being done to protect the remains from the
hordes of people walking all over them. We only saw one building
that had had a shelter built over it to protect it from the elements
but there were no signs of ongoing conservation or preservation.
We made our way back to the bus, with Stef doing a quick
detour through the jungle to a building along the way. By the main
gate there was a small museum with photos and information panels of
how the site was found in the early 20th century. Most
people were back at the café’s at the allotted time of 11:45 for the
bus back to Hoi An so it was frustrating to find that our driver and
guide had just sat down to eat lunch. Stef gave them about fifteen
minutes and then asked when we were off to be met with a “you sit
down and have lunch” from the woman running the café. It seemed to
do the trick though because within minutes we were getting on board
the bus only to find that one person was missing. The irritating
British woman was a lone voice saying we should wait longer but
everyone else wanted to go so off we set.
Beach vendor ("Buy from me, be lucky
for me!")
Back in Hoi An we escaped as quickly as we could to the retreat
of our beach resort and tried one of the local restaurants for
lunch. Tanks at the back were home to large lobsters, one of which
was huge. We had a very tasty and garlicky lunch which set us up
well for a couple of hours lazing on the beach. A quick dip in the
hotel pool rounded off our afternoon and we showered and changed and
caught the hotel’s shuttle back into the town centre.
Today is Tet Eve, or Chinese New Year as we more familiarly
know it. There are a range of different activities taking place in
town tonight and although we had initially thought about going along
a re-read of the information the hotel had given us swayed our minds
and we decided to get the shuttle back to the hotel instead. It had
started to rain before we left the hotel, good luck for Tet
apparently, and the river was running very high in town. We ambled
along to look at some of the riverside restaurants and dodged the
water on the pavement. A little more rain and the whole thing will
be flooded.
There were lots of people out and about with their Lonely
Planet all enjoying their Western food and banana pancakes. There
are noticeably few local people about, probably in part because they
would eat in other places but mainly due to Tet. It is a very family
focussed festival and very few shops are now still open. Most people
are already at home with the celebrations underway.
We
had a not very remarkable meal in a place that was very busy. Our
food took ages to arrive which we wouldn’t have minded if they had
just kept letting us know what was happening. We had much more fun
in the bar next to where we picked up the shuttle back to our hotel.
Although it was a hotel bar it was definitely not a tourist place
and I think we were the novelty for the night there.
