Da Nang

I am an idiot. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that drivers and such won't just offer me the best price. They aren't going to just say to themselves, “Gosh, I don't really want to make as much money as I possibly can today. I'm going to make an offer that actually is what I should make and give the guy a break.” I know this, and I still didn't even bother bargaining with the guy. So I can't even get annoyed with him at all. At least not for the price part of the day.

I had arrived in Da Nang around 1 in the afternoon, once I had collected my luggage from the carousel in the airport and left the building. Then I jousted with a bunch of taxi drivers, who kept getting shooed away from the building. I guess they aren't allowed to come in and bother people who are arriving. I figured that since they couldn't tell me where they would take me, since I didn't know I wanted to go, I wouldn't go with them. And then when they were arguing with each other over how far it was to get to the town center, they were obviously trying to fleece the new arrival. But this time, I was prepared. I had actually looked it up and they were all lying to me about how far I had to go. And since it was only 2 kilometers, according to the information I had, I left them all staring after me and walked it. It was probably a bit farther than 2 kilometers, but I still eventually got a place that I liked and had a reasonable price. Then I went for a walk. I was kind of in search of the train station and had managed to get on the other side of it. I was retracing my steps when I was approached by Son. He started chatting me up and then he handed me his card. He was a Real Easy Rider. And he was recommended by the Lonely Planet. I should have listened to my natural inclination that the Lonely Planet is a load of crap, and been more wary. (This is not to say that I have always thought that. There was a time when I chose to pay close attention to the Lonely Planet. And they do have some good things in their pages. The trouble is that too many people now choose the Lonely Planet as their travel bible, so many of the “charming” places they recommend have become crap because they all go there.) The other problem, that I should have been on the lookout for is that anyone can go to a printing store and get some name cards printed up and put anything they want on there, including “Recommended by the Lonely Planet.” Actually I did realize that and I told him that I would let him know at a later time, in a ploy to have some time to actually look him up on the Lonely Planet website. But then he kept hounding me until I told him where I was staying and then he had me.

When I did look up his information on the Lonely Planet website, I couldn't find anything at all about the man, although I did find out that the Easy Riders are listed as reputable guys on the site. Of course, they only talked about the Easy Riders, not the Real Easy Riders. I was wary, but I had already agreed to his price (without quibbling and whittling it down, idiot that I am), and so I gritted my teeth and decided to go through with it. And it would have been all right, except that I kept thinking about how I had agreed to a ridiculous price for the day and that I was stupid for doing so.

I had agreed to a one day deal, and put off any real discussion about a second day or the two day trip to Hue. That was never going to happen, for two reasons. The first was that I had read the train trip from Da Nang to Hue is quite amazing. The second was that I was not going to be riding on the back of a motorbike for the distance and quite probably through periods of rain. I also had little true interest in Da Nang and I figured one day of that sort of touring would be enough.

The day I had agreed to was a trip out to the ruins of My Son, then into Hoi An, and finally up to the Marble Mountains. All told it was a trip that took me roughly 140-150 kilometers. Unfortunately, I was interested in the ruins, but not really interested in Hoi An, and I could take or leave the Marble Mountains. Equally unfortunately, I turned out to be correct in my assumptions.

The day began with My Son. This is a temple complex that belonged to the Cham Empire. We headed out towards the ruins, which are listed on the increasingly ubiquitous and ridiculous World Heritage lists. It is apparently a Buddhist temple, which surprised me somewhat. When I was in Cambodia, some guide had told me that the Cham people were actually Muslims.

Yet, it was indeed a Buddhist complex. However, there were also Hindu gods being worshipped as well, so this complex was also caught up in the shifting of religions throughout the region that seemed to be taking place in the past 500 years.

Before Son and I reached the My Son complex, however, we passed through lots of little villages.

It had been raining a lot over the past few days, so I was worried about getting wet this day as well. However, people in the villages were acting as though they had no particular worries about rain. They were putting their grains out to dry. On the roads.

In one of the little villages, Son stopped at a small hill with a place of worship. He told me to take a few minutes to walk around. As I did, I realized that this was a Catholic (or maybe I mean Christian; I get those mixed up) worship area. It wasn't a church exactly, but at the top it did have something church-like. It was actually quite interesting.

And it had a great view of the surrounding area from the top.

Off again, we passed a spot where two other people stopped with their guide. We passed by at first, but then Son decided that we should turn around. We did and stopped by the others. He said it would be an interesting spot. Okay. It turned out to be two little factories right next to each other. One was a cloth weaving factory.

The other one was a rice stock broom factory. The notable part of this stop wasn't so much the two factories. I had seen others and these were really not much different. What was interesting was that the guide with the other couple was an Easy Rider. He had a jacket and everything. He knew Son, but Son didn't have anything identifying him as anything. As I had begun to suspect, I had been duped by someone with a good printer. I also suspect, though, that he is trying to break into the whole Easy Rider outfit. But he has a long way to go. Where he stopped and just kind of pointed at the two factories, the other guy was explaining how they worked. He seemed to be a very informative guy and I would have done well to get an actual Easy Rider for a driver/guide.

Then it was on to My Son. I had no idea this spot was in the area, actually. I think I had heard the name, but I had no other information at all. We rolled up to the ticket booth and I bought my ticket, a comparatively cheap 3 dollars, measured against other World Heritage Sights that I have visited. As we rolled up to the site, I noticed yellow buses (that I had read about on Wikitravel) that came from Da Nang to the My Son complex. I could really have done it all on my own, for lots cheaper. Of course, I could also have done it this way for lots cheaper, if I hadn't been such a dumbass. Oh well. But then it was quite a ways from the gate to the site itself, so I guess I was happy to have someone shuttling me around to get close to everything.

After we got to the actual site, he pointed me down the road and told me that he would wait for me to have a look around. I guess like many such places, the motorcycle people aren't actually allowed into the area. They also had their own guides on site, so they wouldn't have wanted the competition from outside people. They would lose revenue from on-site hired guides. I didn't hire one, though. I have seen enough of these sorts of places that I didn't think I would learn enough that was new to merit the expense.

It's a well-preserved site, which surprised me for some reason. I suppose between the Vietnam War and the huge emphasis on tourism, I expected it would be more tarnished than it was. But it is actually quite sedate and well-preserved. There are about 12 little groupings of temples and structures in the complex all set around a walking tour about a kilometer in length. Personally I would imagine that there must be lots more structures hiding in the jungle that haven't been discovered yet, but that will all come in time, I think. Although I didn't hire a guide, I was able to listen to other guides with other groups and I picked up enough to understand the various influences in the complex. And, of course, after seeing all the other places, I was able to pick out the various Buddhist and Hindu figures carved in the various structures. It was quite a nice little walk and the site was definitely a nice surprise.

There is restoration work going on here to put things back together.

But a lot is still virtually untouched, as yet.

After strolling around looking at My Son, my Son (ha ha!!), took me back towards the coast and the World Heritage listed town of Hoi An. This presented another clue that my choice of driver/guide was not the best. Despite having taken me to My Son, my Son was unable to retrace his steps back to the main road without stopping to ask for directions. And then once we got to the main road, despite road signs that even I could read as pointing to our destination, he needed to stop twice more for directions to Hoi An. And then once we finally reached the town, he had to stop again (after spending endless-feeling minutes wandering aimlessly around the center of the village, circling it like some strange carrion bird) to find out where the driver/guides were supposed to stay and wait. I had made a very bad choice. He did work very hard to make sure I was comfortable though. So that's something.

Hoi An was a village that was on the banks of a river and had many colonial influences in the architecture of the old town. Now it is just a tourist town. The buildings of the old town are well-preserved and kudos go to those who made that happen. I'm sure it's a great example of that particular kind of architecture. But along with the preservation of the buildings, they seem to have decided that the only way to justify it is to promote the crap out of it as a wonderful example of colonial architecture. This brings the tourists in droves. Then they decided that since the tourists were there, they needed to have things to sell to the tourists. So most of the buildings have been turned into shops with the usual tourist crap on sale. The buildings that aren't shops are museums or have been turned into period examples that have been renovated to show how they used to be. For a fee, presumably used to maintain the preservation efforts, a visitor can visit one example of each of five types of things, among them one museum, one of a number of bridges, one of a number of restored houses, and a couple of other things. I didn't bother. I was too disheartened and turned off by the completely artificial feel to the whole place. I wandered around for a while, trying to give it a chance. Then I gave up, got some lunch and when Son happened by, we headed off when he said there would be rain soon. Although I was paying a ridiculous amount of money to be taken to here as part of my day, I was really glad to leave it behind and hoping fervently that I would have something else much better as my last memory of the day of checking out the Da Nang area.

And so we headed for the Marble Mountains. The Marble Mountains are a group of 5 small mountains, hills really. They represent the five elements recognized the ancient people of the area. Four of them are the ones that the ancient Greeks recognized: air, fire, water, and earth. I forget off-hand what the last one was here. The main mountain we went to was also a Buddhist place of worship. I knew we had arrived when we started passing a whole bunch of stone carving stores. I guess the Marble Mountains really are made of marble.

We were met on the road by someone who led us to her shop, where she let Son park the motorbike. Then she showed me where to go to get up the mountain, and exhorted me to come back and come in her shop and buy something. Well, with the bike in the shop, I was obviously going to come back, but she was likely in for a disappointment about me buying something.

The first thing I noticed about the site was the big freaking elevator to get up the mountain. And even though I have been chastised for thinking so, I still think it's a bit incongruous for Buddhists to go to a mountain to worship and then take an elevator up to the top. I don't really care that Buddha would probably say that if that's the only way to go, should they be thought less of for taking an elevator. I guess that's why I'm not a Buddhist.

In any case, I walked up the stairs.

At the top of the mountain, there were a lot of caves and little pagodas and other things Buddhist. There were people selling water and sodas and little trinkets (mostly made of marble) to tourists. It was fairly serene otherwise and seemed quite apart from the bustle that existed just at the base of the mountain. I could see how one could gather one's thoughts well in this place. I did enjoy my time up there.

And then I went to the top of the mountain and looked out over what Son wanted to take me to see the next day, China Beach. This is the beach that was the inspiration for the television show and was also an important landing point for American troops during the Vietnam War. I had read somewhere that it was a delightful stretch of beach and the drive along the beach between Da Nang and Hoi An was somewhat idyllic. I won't dispute that it may have been that way at one point, but now it's ugly. There are just resorts or construction of resorts for the whole stretch. And it's ugly. But other than that one little thing, I did have something to make the day end on a good note. I was glad that Hoi An had not been our last stop.

I descended the mountain and headed to the lady's shop where she put the screws to me to buy something, even something small. Her family had not sold a single thing that day and it was going to be such bad luck if they sold nothing. And I could just buy something small. I could buy a necklace of jade, my birth animal. It mattered not to her that I don't wear anything. It mattered not to her that I didn't want to carry anything more. It would only be small. I eventually had to just say no and give no further reason. Just no. She tried to guilt trip me and the whole, and I am quite impressed with myself that I stayed firm. I have no idea if they really had sold nothing all day. I guess I wouldn't be surprised since there are soooo many shops at the base of that mountain and there really didn't seem to be that many people about. But her family's well-being is not my responsibility. Keeping that in mind kept me firm.

Following the mountain, Son took me back to Da Nang and my hotel. He didn't really work me over too much about taking me out the next day. Maybe he had some kind of sixth sense that I wasn't going to go. More likely, he didn't feel any particular need to push too hard, having had the winfall of an idiot who didn't know how to bargain. I still hadn't decided whether I was going to leave the next day or not. But I was glad I didn't have to fend off anyone wanting to take me around for another futile day of seeing things I wasn't going to be impressed with. And I was quite sure that anything further I might go to see would not be very impressive to me.