A Return: Hoi An and My Son

From Hue I took a bus to Hoi An.

Hoi An, which means "peaceful meeting place" is in South Central Vietnam on the coast of the South China Sea. The town is recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO because it is an exceptionally well-preserved example of a 15th to 19th century trading port. It used to be a major hub for all kinds of trade, but particularly spice trade. These days, from what I saw, the economy is based on tourism, souvenirs, and custom tailoring- people are constantly trying to sell you clothing of any design you'd like, tailored to fit you and made in a few days.

I arrived in the evening and wandered around the lantern-strung old area of the city, which is incredibly lovely, and features a lot of crumbling bright yellow paint, contrasted with white trim and dark wood accents.

My camera is unhappy with nighttime. 

Even though these are the actual original buildings, something about the style of restoration or the lanterns hung everywhere gives it a slight Disneyland feel. Maybe it's because every other window is full of souvenirs.

The next day was hellishly hot, but I went out into the streets again to see things in the bright light of day. The town was pretty empty because of the heat, and in the glaring sunlight the buildings looked realer than they had in the glow of the lanterns the day before. I strolled around, dripping with sweat and taking pictures of the riotous blossoms and beautiful old buildings.

The town is perfumed with garish flowers...

...and incense burning in holders on telephone poles. 

It's a gorgeous place, and one where you can see a lot of Chinese influence on the Vietnamese aesthetic.

Because Hoi An was a  trading post, though, you've got all kinds of peoples and cultures meeting up here. They've got a covered bridge built by the Japanese, and they're so proud of it that they charge for entry. So here's a picture of it from the side.

And at one point I ducked into an alley and took one of my favorite photos of the whole trip:

Also, the sidewalks are strewn with puppies being watched by old ladies in sandals. It is truly a utopia.

While in the area I went to check out My Son (pronounced mee sun), a cluster of abandoned and partially ruined Hindu temples constructed between the 4th and the 14th century by the Champa people. This once-great civilization lives on in the 400,000 remaining Cham people, who live mainly in Vietnam and Cambodia and are thought to have originally migrated from Borneo. How about that.

My Son was heavily damaged by American carpet bombing in the Vietnam War. When our tour guide said this, a Canadian woman I had been chatting with on the bus to the ruins crowed, "War crimes!!", almost triumphantly. The guide looked at her sharply but only quietly replied, "No- just a mistake." The Americans had received faulty intelligence that the Viet Cong were using the temples for shelter, so of course the U.S. bombed the hell out of the place. In the space of a single week carpet bombing had reduced most of it, including the temple thought to be the grandest, to formless piles of stones.

The stonework on what remains is pretty splendid, and viewed against the backdrop of the low mountains the ancient, crumbling structures look elemental. They're made of brick, but puzzlingly, there's no mortar. The building techniques used here are still not well understood; it's thought that the bricks were hardened by fire (at what point in the building process is hard to say) or maybe joined with resin. 

I've misplaced many of my photos of the finer carvings on the buildings, but this script should give you a sense of the skill that was at work here:

The temples fell into disuse following the decline of the Champa empire and were "discovered" by a Frenchman in 1898. In the early 1900's a French scholarly society began studying the ruins, which seems to have mainly consisted of lopping the heads off of of statues and sending them to the storerooms of European museums, never to return (not yet, anyway).

 Many of the temples are propped up and covered to keep them from further degradation, although it's not clear how well that's working, or whether they'll be restored anytime soon.

And walking from one site to the other (the place is pretty spread out and forms a sort of suburban complex of temples), I often would glance off into the woods and see a temple that was being left to nature's devices:

To one degree or another.

Restorative efforts are proceeding at a breakneck pace.

After the ruins of My Son, the packaged tour I'd opted for included a trip back to Hoi An by boat. I remember being incredibly bored on this boat trip. I might have been hungover from dinner with some Australians the night before, and I'd gotten up at 6:30 am for this tour, and it was damned hot, and all of that and more made me apathetic about this return trip. Looking at these photos, I can't believe how jaded I was at the time.

We stopped at a waterside village where the people were famous for their woodworking. They craft very fine, bright-eyed boats.

When I asked why the boats have eyes, I got a few answers. My guide said that they have eyes so they can see their way back to shore. But he asked one of the nearby fishermen, who said that fish have eyes, so why not boats? Reasonable. 

The people in this village are also known for detailed woodworking. 

Like this award-winning... thing.

Pretty nice.

You can stop reading here if you want to end on a high note. Stop

right

here.

But if you'll brace yourself for some whining, I'd like to add a PSA for anyone who is or plans on backpacking:

This place was really beautiful, and I did some interesting things and met interesting people while I was there. But, for whatever reason, I was borderline miserable the entire time I was in Hoi An. When I arrived there I had been backpacking for two and a half months, sleeping in uncomfortable beds in crowded hostels or lonely hotel rooms, wearing the same four sets of clothes on rotations and, I felt, having basically the same conversations with the same types of people. Here's a real bummer of an excerpt from my journal at the time:

"...suddenly all the stress and loneliness, and homesickness that I've kept suspended, hanging by fragile strings, crashes on me. And I feel so alone, and I want to go home, and I don't care about your ancient architecture or your paper lanterns. I'm tired of not having a real conversation. I'm tired of sweating and insect bites and food that doesn't taste right and people who laugh at me (I know they are) and people who don't know me. Nobody knows me here. And it's not freeing, it's horrible. I feel erased."

This makes for pretty obnoxious reading in hindsight, seeing as it was, objectively, the opportunity of a lifetime to see a different culture.  I'd love to go back to this place now and sit in the sun and eat pho until it came out of my ears, but at the time my feelings were genuine. So to those who are currently or would like to take a trip like this in future: unless you are a natural nomad, you will probably feel this way. You'll be tired and exhausted with the alienness of all of it and bored of latching on to strangers and telling your abbreviated life story. You will have these first world problems. Expect them.

Next: Dalat, very briefly