All to ourselves

Tuesday walking: 2.5km

Tuesday swimming: 0.3km

Cocktails: 1 

Wednesday walking: 2.8km

Tuesday swimming: 0.28km

Cocktails: 2

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We're Rough Guide sort of people rather than Fodor's or Lonely Planet. And today the Rough Guide more than repaid its purchase price.

From about the 7th century the central part of Vietnam was ruled by a sect of Hinduism known as Cham or Champa. They built impressive temple complexes from stone, brick and lime (yes, from La Basse Cour to Vietnam and I'm still talking about lime). The French when they colonised Vietnam discovered and excavated a complex at My Son, near to Hoi An where we are at present, finding a variety of buildings dating back to the 7th century.

My Son is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a popular visit for tourists staying in Hoi An. Here's where the Rough Guide comes in, it told us that the site opens at 7am, most tourists travel by coach and get picked up from their hotels at 8am and it takes an hour so ..... get to My Son early and you'll be the only people there. So we got a ride out just after dawn and were almost the only people on site for an hour.

There were one or two other pairs of eyes there however:

The setting is evocative in a bowl in the jungle. If you thought some of the buildings were leaning in my photographs you were correct. Tragically, having survived largely intact for 13 centuries the area was used as a base by the Viet Cong in the conflict that is known in this country as the American War. It was subjected to carpet bombing and use of defoliants and several of the temples and buildings were effectively destroyed, many others show large cracks and now lean from the damage they took.

There's a rather poignant modern exhibit among the ancient relics in one of the buildings, placed in front of a huge structural crack in the wall:

Chapeau Rough Guide!