My second day in Hoi An started with a bus ride to My Son (pronounced Mee-Sun) - Cham ruins 3 hours outside of Hoi An.
I was picked up by a tour company. The tour started at 8 am and ended at 2pm - included transportation to and from the ruins, and a boat ride back into town with a vegetarian lunch - all for the low price of $8 US. The tour captain, a Vietnamese man who spoke very good english and looked like Jackie Chan (and sort of had a sense of humor like him too), declared us "tiger team" and told us we could call him Mr. Tiger Woods. Seriously. He told corney jokes the whole time. He HATED Americans, and made it know. In fact, he is the first person on this trip who has told me to my face how much he hated Americans. At the end of the tour he asked me, "You are American. Yes?" "Yes - you can tell by my accent I'm sure." "I can tell by everything" he replied.
His anti-American setiments aside, he was an excellent tour guide of the ruins, and I tipped him generously.
My Son was amazing. Cham ruins from the 8th and 9th C, they predate Angkor Wat. To get to the ruins, you drive into a deep valley surorunded by mountains. The Cham people used this site as a Hindu temple. They did not live on the site. Rather, they would build one temple for every king. Once the king died, they would burn him and burry the ashes underneath the temple constructed in his honor. Therefore, there are several temples place within very close proximinty of one another - one temple for every king. (The Cham people do still exist but have since moved to south Vietnam and have converted to Islam.)
There is some controversary about how the Cham people constructed the red bricks that the temples were made out of. No vegetation grow on the bricks, and until the Americans bombed the hell out of the place, the temples stood more or less in tact (through several major earthquakes) for centuries. The bricks seem to lack morter. One theory is that when the temples were build the bricks were still soft, and that they were stuck together by local tree sap. Once the temple stood erect, the Cham people would build a scaffolding around the temple that they would then light on fire, baking the bricks in place at around 200 degrees C. Once the bricks were baked, they were rubbed with a mixture of sugar and honey to preserve their color and to prevent moss and other plantlife from growing upon them.
(The temples of the 8-9th C are made of this unique brick ,while the temples of the 9-10th C are made of imported sandstone. These sandstone temples more closely resemble the temples of Angkor Wat. )
Speaking of temperature, it was 37 degrees celcius at the site - which felt damn hot. Many of the tour participants thought the tour was too short for how much there was to see - but after a few hours wandering around the valley (no tree cover) in that kind of heat, we were ready to leave.
All the people in the tourism industry in Vietnam seem to know what is and is not a UNESCO world heritage site - and My Son was named one in 1998. With this certification came some money. It looks like the money was spent on a very lavish visitors center and some metal placards - but not much else.
One reason for the UNESCO money, I'm sure, was that the restoration (or ruin stabilization) attempted in the past was a total joke. 30 years ago the Vietnamese people tried to reconstruct several of the temples using contemporary cement (and the total effect of using the cement looks awful). Several other temples were buttressed with really chinsy looking metal rods. UNESCO is currently working on a 300,000 restoration of one of the temples (I took tons of pictures) - but the restoration does not seem to be following UNESCO protocal (i.e. no anastolysis). Very interesting - there did not seem to be any UNESCO people on site yet tons of Vietnamese folks (trained? untrained?) were working on the restoration. I took tons of pictures and tons of notes. My Son will most certaintly end up in my dissertation. (I won't bore you with the details, but the site has reconstruction work going on right now, restoration work, and ruin stabilization work - I don't know of any other UNESCO W.H. site that can boast of all three).
One of the ruin clusters has been totally demolished by US bombs. Our tour guide told us, "I think when you walk around these ruins you will feel sad.." and I did. Where once stood the tallest and most majestic of all the ruins in the My Son complex, now is a pile of bricks. You can see bomb craters littering the landscape, and several bombshells have been kept on site.
The Americans are not the only guilty party in this My Son tragedy, the French also have dirty hands. One of the reasons My Son is special is because, unlike Angkor Wat, the Cham temples were never converted to Buddhism. The temples still feature statues of the Hindu gods. However, none of the statues (or reliefs on the walls) have their heads. Some French explorers chopped all of the heads off and the heads now reside in the Louvre. Vietnam is currently in a fruitless battle to have the heads returned.
Once we returned to the bus, we drove to the boat where we ate an adequate (but not exceptional) meal of vegetables and rice. It just so happened to be the 14th day of the lunar cycle and Hoi An was prepairing for their full moon festival. Many of the restaurants (and people) only prepair vegetarian dishes on this day. So we ate our veg and rice and sailed down the river. On the boat I met a young woman who had just graduated from the University of Chicago. We talked about Ted Cohen and Martha Nussbaum (philosopher) whom she had taken classes from. She was severe and scared about starting her "real life" - she seemed very much like the typical U of C student to me (perhaps over studious, very serious, and a little terrified).
We arrived at a small boat making village where we watched a man waterproof a boat using centuries old technique of jamming dried bamboo and sap between the boards. We walked around the village some and the reboarded the boat.
We disembarked in Hoi An, right at the city center. From here, I walked back to the hotel to take a dip in the pool as it was very, very hot.
I then walked to Bo Bo, a recommended local restaurant, where everything was so cheap and good that I totally over ordered. My new Italian friends dropped by while I was eating and we discussed the travels of our day (they had rented a motorbike and had a nice ride out to the Marble Mountains.)
Once the sun set I headed for the river as today was the full moon festival. As I mentioned before, during the festival people refrain from eating meat. They also perform more ritualistic burning (of paper money - usually US dollars) and leave offerings for ancestors (cigarettes, candy, fruit are all placed outside homes and shops). The downtown of Hoi An also turns off all of its electricity and the city is lit only by candle lanterns. It is wonderfully beautiful. People buy paper lanters and send them down the river. I sat by the river and watched the lanterns float by.
While sitting on the river steps, I met two young Scottish boys studying to be doctors. We chatted for several hours about everything and nothing until I was tired enough to bid them goodnight and return to my room for a much needed sleep.
Tomorrow: Hoi An Day 3: Beach day, DaNang and safe plane flight into HCMC.
