Sue and I have survived our first tour of Vietnam. Running out of things to do in the beautiful city of Hoi An we rashly booked a tour of the "My Son Holy Land". This is our tour guide on the left. The tour company collected punters from hotels all over the city in small vans and then herded us into a coach on the edge of town. When our driver exhorted us to leave the van with a cry of "take all your belongings with you" I felt a frisson of alarm.
It was grey and drizzly as we sped to our destination about an hour from the city. Our guide did his best with limited English to convey the delights that would have been in store, but for the US carpet bombing of the area in 1969. On arrival we found something like Ankor Wat writ very small and interspersed with flooded craters.
While our guide enthusiastically demonstrated the purpose of the damaged Lingam and Yoni sculptures I took photos of butterflies. By the end of the tour our wet and bedraggled party wanted nothing more than to return to their hotel rooms, but a boat trip and tour of a "carpentry village" village were inflicted on us instead, before we were finally abandoned in the centre of Hoi An and left to make our own way back from whence we'd come.
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