During our visit to Hoi An, we went to see the Cham (or Champa) ruins at My Son. (Not to be confused with another My Son District to the south where the hamlet of My Lai, infamous in American history, is located.)The Champa were an ancient civilization throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand and Java. Through the early second millenia A.D., as ethnic Vietnamese started to unify the country, the ethnic Champa were pushed out or assimilated. My Son was the intellectual capital for the Champa kingdom.
We got there by taking a budget tour operator--cheap, but not the kind of intimate experience that I wrote about earlier. It's the kind of thing that western tourists only do, and one funny thing is how the two Vietnamese friends with us kept getting mistaken for foreigners. For example, they would initially be charged the foreigner's price for everything, and then there was a lot of backtracking and refunding when the tour operator realized he had compatriots on his hands. (Almost everything here has an actual price and a foreigner's price.)
It was about 50km by coach bus to the entrance and gift shop. You hike about 10 minutes to a rally point to get a jeep a little further up the mountain. Then you hike for about 90 minutes through the forest to about five different sites like the one pictured. Some of them are closed off for archaeologists to work on. There is limited opportunity for actually learning much from the tour guides, so if you are going you'll want to study up on Google, Wikipedia and your guide book before you go.
On the return, we opted for a boat trip. The coach bus dropped off about half of us on a tour boat that cruised on the Bu Thon River back to Hoi An. It was relaxing and cool under the awning.
Along the way, we stopped at a "handicraft village." These are communes set up with government support with a lot of people working on the same industry--silk weaving, candy making, etc. This one was wood carving, on a small island on the Bu Thon River. Frankly, it was pathetic. This one was worst than most, but all of them show the unintended consequences of ghettoizing any kind of land use from other uses. (I'm always an ambassador for mixed-use zoning, and next time I come to Vietnam I'm bringing a stack of Jane Jacobs books to pass out to my friends here.)
What you see at a handicraft village like this is about a dozen shops and studios, a lot of shopworn merchandise, the faded signs of some government investment that happened years ago, and a lot of people resentfully dependent on the small number of unimpressed and hungry tourists who are being force-marched through by the tour operator.
Again, Julie arranged the one authentic experience out of the visit. When the tour guide gave us 15 minutes to look around, everyone else just shrugged and headed back to the boat to wait. Julie took us to a back street and found a little shack that served as the neighborhood refreshment stand. When we showed up back at the boat with plastic baggies filled with shaved ice and coffee, we were the envy of the group.
-Robert
