Catch up – Hoi An 09.01.07

Up early for a 7.45am pick up for the My Son Tour.  “My Son” means beautiful mountain, and it was home to the ancient Champa people who may have also built Borobodur in Java, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.  Wikipedia is a little fuzzy on this point, but our guide claimed they were the same people.

Duy Phú is about a 1.5hr bus ride from Hoi An, after you buy a ticket (60,000D), you walk to a tin shed, where you wait for one of these to take you the last few k’s.

This is our guide, showing us a statue of Shiva, and encouraging us to stand behind it with only our heads showing for a photograph.  We declined, but many didn’t.

A detail of some of the stonework.  The workmanship was incredible – the fact that it is still standing today is testament to the incredible skills they had.  Many of the patterns on the stonework reminded me very much of Victorian decorative work.

A temple under restoration.  In the foreground you can see a deep crater full of water.  This is a bomb crater, made during the American war.  Until then, many of the towers still reached to the heavens, but ruthless bombing reduced much of what was left to rubble.  My Son is a magical place, but again with the rain, and the endless floods of whinging tourists, and a tour guide that threatened to leave without you if you didn’t get back tot he bus on time.  This is a place that needs time and contemplation, and I think Mark and I would both love to go back – with our own driver.

Back to Hoi An in the afternoon, and we found the Optometrists that I had seen from the bus earlier in the day.  We were doubly lucky to arrive when Ninh, an English teacher from the local high school was also there.  She dropped everything and became our official translator for the next 15 minutes, even translating for an eye test!  Mark had forgotten to pack contact lenses, and since he is so very blind, wouldn’t have been able to go snorkeling without them.

Back to wandering around Hoi An, we found this statue in what looked like a parking lot.  We have decided that he is Karl Marx, because it’s unlikely that the people of Hoi An would erect a monument to Normie Rowe.

Back at the markets, I found this woman selling a large number of onion variants.  The white ones in the small dish in the middle were smaller than my pinkie, and looked like onion grass.

Back at the hotel, overlooking the river and having a Biere Larue.  Tastes like VB, but is the local beer, and has a very attractive tiger on the label. 

Then off to cooking class.  We learned how to make “Vegetarian Pho”, Fresh Rice paper rolls, and Tofu with Chilli and Lemongrass.  The Pho wasn’t Pho.  It was a very nice vegetable soup with rice noodles, but it wasn’t Pho.  I think I’ll have to do a cooking class to learn how to make the dead creature variety, and then adapt the recipe myself.  Along with bacon and salami, Pho is something I miss very much, and the opportunity to taste it in Vietnam has been haunting me.  So far, every Pho I have tried has been like 2 minute rice noodles, with no character.  Apparently Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) has great Pho.  I live in hope.

On our way home from dinner, we walked through the market, and encountered some Hoi An Nightlife 🙂