HoiAn 4th of July

I'm sitting here in our crumbling hotel room enjoying the birdsong outside the window, HoiAn is certainly a lot cleaner than Hanoi. The staff here are very pleasant so it doesn't matter that the TV has to be slapped and the door handle in the bathroom is hanging on precariously !

We arrived in DaNang yesterday morning after leaving Hanoi on an 8.05 flight, DaNang looked like the Gold Coast and our taxi driver very proudly pointed out all the new resorts and the cornucopia of marble statues for sale. After a very pleasant drive we arrived at our hotel where we were given complimentary early check in. It was so hot in our room so we decided rather than relax we would go into the township by shuttle bus to explore. 

The shuttle bus dropped us off in front of the hotels 'sister tailor', for those of you who do not know about HoiAn - it is actually a travel destination because it has over 200 tailors and shoe makers . Tbc we haven't taken any photos on the ipad because Liz finds it tedious to take out. So this although not picturesque is of me at Cargo Company a famous restaurant and patisserie.

I am writing this in retrospect although I am writing on the 5th this entry is about our wonderful day trip yesterday. We booked a trip to 'My Son' which means beautiful mountain - the mountain in question is the Garuda Mountain.My Son was a Hindu place of worship the intricate temples were built by the Champa people between the 9th and 11th century. No one lives at the temples as it is DiSan Van Hoa The Gori - Holy Land.

The sad thing is that before the war in 1965 the French had catalogued the temples and taken photographs of them as it was a site of historical importance. However  in 1969 President Nixon ordered B52's to bomb My Son because the Vietkong were hiding there. Our guide was extremely distraught because his father was a member of theVietkong. The bomb craters are immense and the destruction is heart breaking, I was very disturbed by the tour. It was a place where agent orange and Napalm were used to destroy all that was alive.

Another sad thing is that the French cut the heads off all the statues of Shiva for private collectors. The area is now a Unesco site and a lot of reconstruction in taking place. We were really lucky to see site G it was only opened two weeks ago to the public. There are ten temple sites three of which still have undetonated land mines. It was a very worthwhile excursion. We opted to take a river cruise home the highlights of this was the woodcarvers village on an island called Kim Bong. Liz was enraptured by the hand crafted fishing boat and I fell in love with the humble carved water buffalo!