My Son

So here we are at My Son, about 35 km and a hired car (and driver too! - we shared the cost with a bunch of travel mates so it ended up being much cheaper then the advertised 'optional tour' our company offered) away from Hoi An in central Vietnam. It is the religious centre for the Champa people, the original inhabitants of central and southern Vietnam (or at least they were here before the Vietnamese people, arriving - from Indonesia? Malaysia? noone really knows) by the 2nd century AD. Heavily influenced by Indian culture (like the Khmer people of Cambodia) they worshipped the 3 major Hindu deities Brahma, Vishnu and (especially) Siva. As such their religious architecture and sculpture is in marked contrast to that of the Vietnamese who gradually occupied Cham territory from Northern Vietnam from the 14th century onwards and whose culture is more heavily indebted to their Chinese neighbours. The Champa people are still around today as a Vietnamese ethnic minority though the majority have now converted to Islam.

Anyway, the ruins of the religious centre were mysterious-haunting - set amid the huge fan-like leaves of great tropical plants and overgrown with vegetation in misty-humid hills and (because we had hired a car rather then a tour bus) were an eerie quiet for the enigmatic statues. There are a few tablets of texts scattered amid the ruins in a language noone speaks and which may never be deciphered, and the whole overgrown temple feeling has one feeling a little 'Indiana Jones.' Sadly, like so much cultural history around the world, the ruins have been wrecked by the often random destructiveness of 20th century warfare: for the majority of the ruins (not pictured) centuries of slow, romantic decay were given a rather major push when they were obliterated by US bombs during the Vietnam war.

It was interesting that we should visit a place of lost cultural memory on the day we lost some of our own photographs... the mystical nature of the place was a fitting one in which to think about time, the present, life, memory and everything. But enough philosophising - we're about to head off on xe-om (motorbikes) to visit a huge Buddha statue!

Love to all.