Rain continues - My Son

 My Son was the first booked in trip I had so far. There was no other choice really, or the choice was between getting soaked on a day trip with motor bike and a tourist bus..My Son is relatively close to Hoi An, it is still too far of a distance to just hire a bike and go. So the tour bus was the only acceptable option really. Well  you have to experience it all to know what you really like and what you don't ;)

My Son complex - introduction made by our tour guide

I was all excited about this trip as I like ancient cities and the whole history of misterious places like that. In the name of seeing unique places you can handle a lot, and you know how it goes after little while. That you need to stop at certain places for a toilet stop (even though the toilet facility wasn't somehting I would come close to in Eurpe -
just a hole in a ground surrounded with walls and with water hose next to it - and buses of tourists pouring through it every day), other places for a food stop (restaurants that live out only from tourist buses coming and goingm but the quality of service would be questionable..), a souvenir stop.. and then you get to the place of your destination, to have all of the previous fcilities again in one place. And you need to go through them either at the beginning or at the end. No escape!

I think we were only a second or a third bus arriving this morning. So the stie was relatively quiet. We were given an introduciton and the site rules and off we went. There was one path you could follow really and as you can see from the map above you have to make a circle to see everything. We were also told not to go off from the beatten track as there are still some mines uncovered and it could be dangerous....

With introduction like that you start feeling a bit like Rambo yourself (!).

Interestingly enough it is still not known how the complex was built. There was no mortar used to keep the bricks together. Yet the bricks look like glued to each other. Everything in these Hindu temples fitts tight and it survived so many centuries (it was built between 4 - 14th century), if not the bombings it would have been in much better shape. French archaelogists were trying to repeat the effort as a sort of case study and they failed. So the technique used to hold the buildings together is still unknown - a question mark. Some say that the mortar could have evaporated through the years and that's why there is no sign of it now. I will leave this one with the scientists, let them figue this one out :).

Some of the buildings were open for touristis, inside you could see some scupltures and pieces of architecture rescued from being damage. Not all of it was authentical. Some of them were just a copies of real things or things restored based on the current knowledge, but not the actual pieces picked up in the complex.

Bullets in one of the temples - a reminder
that Vietnam is still not free from the war remainings.

The country and its people have still many years to come before they will come relatively clean from it. And many generations to come before they will deal with their past and learn how to deal with their difficult past.

Like most places in Vietnam, this one was also not free from construction work. There were places where you could not enter, sometimes you could see big piles of old bricks and other remainings waiting to be sorted out. Some sections were closed off completely.
Again, they could use some help with investors and their money to try and save their inheritage. I hope they will find the way eventually, it would be a terrible loss if they didn't...