My Son Temples

The guide who met us at Hui airport and brought us to Hoi An met us again this morning and we went by car to the World Heritage site at My Son - a journey of about an hour through towns and countryside. On the way we saw some cows and a few water buffalo but they were in paddy fields a bit too far away to photograph.

The My Son complex consists of temples built in the mountains to Hindu divinities like Shiva and Krishna by the Champas between the 4th and 13th centuries and some of them are still in amazingly good condition considering their age. Others were destroyed by bombing during the Vietnam war and reconstruction of a few has been started. The blip shows our guide surveying one of these that was left as rubble but where some reconstruction has started. 
One of the extras shows a temple in a better state and another one shows the bomb craters that are still evidence of the war. 
One of the reasons Mrs AMK has always wanted to visit Vietnam is that in our school and student days the conflict was very much part of daily news and it only ended in 1975 , the year we were married.

After we returned to Hoi An the guide took us on a walking tour of the Old Town and there we learned more about the local history and we visited some old temples like the one seen in the extra and a 200 year old house that has been preserved and is still lived in by descendants of the original family.

We parted with our guide feeling we know so much more but a bit relieved that we can chill out for the next couple of days and rest our weary limbs !