Day 11: My Son ruins and backpacker bonding

Up bright and early for our trip out to My Son, where there are ruins from the Champa empire dating back to the 4th century. The bus was picking us up at 5am, so we were down in reception waking up the caretaker at 4.55am, not so bright eyed or bushy tailed. The thinking behind the early start was to a) beat the heat of the day and b) avoid the crowds, otherwise I'd have been safely tucked up in the land of nod.

We were both chuckling to ourselves like teenagers during the pre tour talk from the guide, as he gave us a brief history of the ruins and warned us about the state that they were in and the number of 'bum holes' resulting from American B52 bombardment during the war.

The ruins themselves were surrounded by thick jungle, with mist shrouded hills in the background, but were fairly unspectacular themselves. The bombing destroyed so much of the site that there are very few intact buildings remaining. However, what did remain was ample evidence of the workmanship of the ancient Champa people, with numerous sculptures of the Hindu gods they worshipped and fantastically constructed brickwork buildings.

On the journey back, I could see lots of things laid out by the side of the road, drying out. These were different colours and some were easily identified, such as sweetcorn. There was one I could not identify though and so asked our guide for help. He informed me it was rice, and now I have a whole new perspective on the rice that we cook back home as well as eating here. It is easy to eat food when you don't know how it's prepared, but having seen the rice from the fields being dried out on sacks literally on the road, with lorries and cars driving over it regularly, it makes you stop and think!

The photo shows the sweetcorn drying out. It was taken at speed in the bus, so it is a bit of an action shot!

Then it was back to the hotel for a day relaxing by the pool before going for a bite to eat in town. After dinner we decided to go for a walk over the bridge on Cam Nam island. There we found a backpacker bar called Sleepy Gecko's. Having met only a few english-speaking people on our brief travels so far, it was quite nice to talk at length with new faces, so meeting Dan the builder from NYC provided some entertainment for the evening. Watching JP get trounced at pool by the Vietnamese barmaid, who appeared to be a hustler, was also fun, coming as it did hard on the heels of my own pathetic performance at said sport. We finished up there at about 11pm and headed home to the hotel, to wake up the caretaker for the second time that day.