It’s our second morning in Hoi An and we return to Tribee Bana for an 8am pick-up to the ruins of My Son. Around us backpackers wander in and out, charging their phones at reception or in one girl’s case, curl up asleep in a chair, while we wait… and wait, until 45 minutes later a minibus finally pulls up and we clamber on board to be ferried to a pick up point on the outskirts of the town where we join a larger coach, for our trip to the ancient temple complex.
Our guide is a cocky chap in his late thirties in a cap called Mr Funny Dzung and he thinks he’s a comedian. Funny by name, mildly amusing in person and brimming with confidence, “I speak excellent English” he repeats to us all many times.
Visiting My Son
My Son means Beautiful Mountain and is about 50km west from Hoi An. A collection of Hindu temples built by the Champa kingdom, they are similar in style to Cambodia’s iconic complex at Angkor Wat but much smaller, and at 1300 years old, much, much older. It takes about an hour to reach them, our coach weaving through rural scenes, before we disembark and grab a cold coffee with fresh coconut at the little café by the entrance.
Funny gathers us all together, along with another coach party that has just arrived, and leads us all to the ticket barrier and then across a flag-strewn bridge to a little shuttle bus station where we are loaded onto a stream of motorised buggies and ferried 2km up a steep hill to the ruins. Once we’re all reunited again Funny leads us to a map illustrating all the main structures and, after rushing the previous tour guide and her entourage out of the way, explains the history of the site.
Built well over a millennia previously, the site had been abandoned for centuries and was eventually lost to the jungle, remaining completely covered for over 300 years until a team of French archaeologists were led there by locals in the 1880s. They uncovered over 70 buildings, looting most of the statues and antiquities in the process and shipping them back to France. Work on the site continues to this day, but tragically the US bombed the hell out of the complex trying to hit the Viet Cong in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, damaging or destroying 50 of the temples. Their recent outrage over the destruction of Palmyra by ISIS seems to ring hollow in the face of their own cultural destruction.
Visiting My Son
We start our exploration to the west in the tomb area, reserved for burial of the kings, but have to be careful where to tread as bomb craters abound and visitors are still unable to explore the wilder areas due to unexplored munitions. With Funny marshalling our crowd of nearly 40 people along, Coman and I start sneaking ahead, dodging loads of other tourists in an attempt to get good shots. We head down into the central area facing east, which was for worshipping Shiva and make our way in and out of the ruins.
It’s a fascinating place and whets our appetites for the glories of Angkor Wat to come. After two hours we all clamber back on board the coach and leave My Son, heading for the Hoai river. Awaiting us there is a small boat, which we all board for our cruise back to Hoi An. Lunch is served on paper plates – a basic but delicious curry and rice –and we relax in the sun, crowded onto plastic chairs until we’re finally dropped back in the town about 3pm near the Japanese Bridge.
The following day we take bikes from the hotel for a very different day out, cycling a few miles out of Hoi An to the white sands and palm trees of An Bang beach on the South China Sea.
An Bang beach
Our initial experience on arriving at An Bang is somewhat fraught with over-zealous parking attendants trying to charge us an exorbitant fee for using a bike park and insisting we can’t go any further. Very un-typically for south east Asians, who are all unfailingly polite and avoid conflict as a sign of good Buddhist manners, they’re rude and bolshy, so we refuse to play ball and head off down a side road parallel to the beach instead, cycling past cute little guest houses and café’s before taking a chance down an alley to the sand.
We park up our bikes, locking them to a little fence, and emerge onto the grand sweep of the beach by a rustic shack called Tree Coconut where two sun beds and a parasol cost us £1.60 for the afternoon, a beer is 80p and a margarita is a princely £2. It’s pretty much perfect.
To the north we can see the high-rise hotel cityscape of Danang twenty miles away and on the horizon in front of us are the Cham Islands, where scuba divers hang out. The beach is far less busy here and we relax, reading, swimming in the tropical waters and watching people surf and paraglide. After a couple of hours chilling on sun loungers we go for a walk along the beach, heading past a few beach bars and ever more crowded sections of sand, ending up at a restaurant called La Plage, where we eat lunch gazing out at the blue sea.
An Bang beach
The rest of the afternoon is spent in a very chilled state, aided by the afore-mentioned cheap-as-chips margaritas, and we cycle back to Hoi An as the sun starts to set, its reflections rippling over the rice fields. It’s the perfect bit of “holiday” time before our travels start in earnest once more. Tomorrow we head back to one of the busiest and most exciting cities in Asia – Ho Chi Minh City, more famously known as Saigon!
