Temples and bicycles

Another early start this morning. We spent some time researching cheap options to tour the My Son Sanctuary, a hindu temple complex about an hour away from Hoi An. There were private cars, and buses, and private buses, with differing length of time to visit, differing tourist shop stopovers, and of course differing prices. In the end, Mario found a company that offered a "sunrise" tour, arriving at My Son hours before anyone else, and allowing the time to explore the area in relative quiet. Plus, the entire price for the two on us, including a small breakfast(buttered bread, a hard-boiled egg and a banana!) and water, was less than the total price to hire a private car, so we bought in.
Anyway, back to early morning, sky still dark, Mario and I sitting on the sidewalk outside our hotel, waiting for a big bus to come and get us...You can imagine my surprise when a guy on a scooter shows up! There's NO WAY we are travelling an hour to the temple like this! But no, it's just the company's very efficient way of picking up all of its clients. The bus sticks to the main roads, the scooter dodges and weaves into the narrow laneways, of which there are a lot here in Hoi An, and they cover twice as much distance in the same amount of time! Plus, now Mario can say that we got to ride 3 people on a scooter in Vietnam. He would have been happy riding all the way to the temple, too.
A long, sleepy bus ride later and we are getting whisked away by electric shuttle, up a hill the middle of the rain forest, to the ruins of the My Son temple complex. Everyone we have spoken to has mentioned that if you've visited Angkor Wat, My Son is nothing in comparison. Lucky for us, we have NOT been to Angkor Wat yet, so we figure this will be a good taste of the things to come. The two were built during similar periods of history, and so the architecture and design elements are basically the same. What My Son can also boast, is war wounds. During the Vietnam-American war, the temple was hit hard, due to the fact that soldiers had taken up residence in one of the large buildings. The surroundings are now dotted with bomb craters, and some temples are in crumbled heaps, too far gone to restore to their former glory.

There are some temples that have gotten a face-lift here - when the My Son sanctuary was awarded UNESCO world heritage status, the University of Milan sent archaeologists to excavate some areas of the site, and restore some of the structures. As a result, you can see a significant difference in the weather-eroded corners and openings of the old, and the bright orange, straight-sided replacement bricks of the new. More recently, India has worked in partnership with Vietnam to further advance the restoration work, and as we tour the site, workers are doing excavations on a section of the ares where we are not allowed to visit. It's a work in process.

We follow our small group along pathways in between tall towers, some being held in place by scaffolding, into temples devoted to the worship of the 3 Hindu gods, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, and along lush green walkways past misty mountain views. Sadly, there is no sunrise, but the emptiness of the site, and the feeling of being the only ones here certainly make up for that fact. We have a very sad cup of coffee(worst of this trip)at the rest area, before boarding the electric shuttle back to the bus, and back into Hoi An.


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Insert here being dumped off the bus in the middle of Hoi An, a LONG walk back to the hotel, and a nice shower to wash off the early morning, and out we went again!
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Our afternoon's adventure is a little more challenging. It involves borrowing bikes from our hotel, and navigating our way through the rice paddies north of the city across the vegetable village island, and to An Bang beach, a big tourist draw near Hoi An. It also involves 2 flat tires, one of which happens just as we are reaching the furthest point of our trip, so I'll let you imagine how that panned out. Important take-away? All the hotels and resorts between here and the beach rent bikes, which means all of the hotels and resorts also have bicycle pumps they are willing to lend out to desperate travelers. Also, sometimes it is nice to slow down, and have a better appreciation for what is going on around you. We watch as a rice paddy "foreman" drives past us on his scooter, stopping at the irrigation channel water valves to check if the fields are properly flooded, and whether the mechanisms are in good working order. We pass some men sitting on the side of a main road, fishing poles in hand, trying to catch their supper, as the tomb of a 16th century Japanese merchant looms in the background. We make it back to the hotel before the sun sets.
As a consolation for our challenging afternoon's adventure, we head back into town, past the lanterns and tailors and souvenir shops, back to the little cafe we discovered on on first day here, for a sit-down meal(and not on plastic stools on the sidewalk kind of sit-down meal, thank you!). Turns out, the cafe stretches for what seems like miles, all the way to the next street over, with a 2nd floor balcony overlooking the lanterns and tailor shops and tourists buying souvenirs. It's a wonderful place, a warm, breezy night, and we eat one of the tastiest meals we've had in Vietnam. I'd even go so far as saying it was better than our cooking class. Yum.