If you like that kind of thing

We met Owen and his friend for breakfast at the restaurant across the street from the hotel where we stayed the night and had traditional Vietnamese steak and eggs. In this cooking process, the cast iron dishes are baked to an extreme temperature and then the eggs and steak and vegetables are added to the dish and it all cooks on the table in front of you. It was very good and Chris had Vietnamese coffee with it, something that also cooks at the table.

He was served something that looked like an individual percolator and he said the coffee was very strong. Iced coffee is popular here, too, and is made using the same process although the coffee drips into a glass that has already been coated with condensed milk and then ice is added.

We drove through the small city of Duc Pho and Owen said you can tell when a city has grown up over an American base because the streets are perfectly straight and the roads are very good. Owen had given us a bit of choice about how we wanted to spend our day and outlined for us several possibilities, including visiting the My Son ruins “if you like that sort of thing.” Owen prides himself on his tours being off the beaten path, which we have appreciated until this point, but we wouldn’t skip a Unesco World Heritage site just because it’s listed in guide books and others will also be there.

The only rule was to stay on the path because this is an area where there could still be landmines, and we hired a Vietnamese guide, Duyen, to walk us through the Sanctuary and tell us about the ruins. Her English was very good; she had studied at university in Saigon and said she liked to speak it very much. The ruins were discovered in modern times by French archaeologists and are located in the ^th and 13^th centuries are striking against a jungle backdrop. While all that remains today is a small ethnic minority group, the Champa were Indian Hindus that settled in the region: a valley surrounded by a ring of mountains, including the Holy Mountain. Under this Hindu influence, temples were built to Shiva, Vishnu and Krishna. These tower temples are what is left of the My Son Civilization. There

were 70 monuments in(relative)tact before World War II, the Indochina Wars and the Vietnam War but bombing in this area reduced this number to 20. As one walks the site, bomb craters are clear in the landscape. There has been a concerted conservation effort, as well as reconstruction that has been supported by the Polish and French governments, among others. Duyen was able to show us different bas-reliefs of Shiva, the goddess of destruction, and also explain why she was so celebrated. Like the Vietnamese attitude about the floating season, Shiva’s destructive powers were held in very high regard as destruction was necessary for rebirth and new growth. The brick work was unbelievable. It doesn’t appear that there is mortar between the bricks they are so tightly connected and when asked to identify which parts are original and which are renovated, it is easy to mistake the old for the new. There are temple altars representing the joining of male and female throughout and there are stones with Sanskrit carved into them. Duyen mentioned several times she believed it to be a peaceful place and I think it must be lovely to work there, deep in the forest with the sunlight falling on the temple towers and the mountains as a regal backdrop.

Champa Kingdom region and the remains of temple towers built between the 4

On our walk away from the site and back through the forest, we chatted with Duyen about this and that. Almost every day a Vietnamese person asks me if I have children. When we had dinner in Saigon with Mrs. Chi, she asked me and when I said no she thought she had translated poorly and asked again. It was incomprehensible to her that I didn’t and she eventually dropped it. Mr. Hung asked me and when I said I did not, he said he was very sorry. Yesterday a woman in the market asked me and when I said no, she looked at my hips and said I should be able to with hips like mine. It is clear that having children is very important here and it is hard for the people we have encountered to understand that I am happy and, more importantly, not ashamed of being childless. On our walk, Duyen also asked if we had children and when I said no, she said we seemed like happy people anyway. We asked her if she had children and she said no, she wasn’t even married and she was very old. In follow up we learned that she was only 28, but it was clear that 28 was very old to not be married with children here in Vietnam.

We met Owen for lunch on the grounds of the My Son Sanctuary property and had something that was either called Slippery Noodle or Slimy Noodle, I cannot remember which and it was noodles with beef in broth that was quite good. It is hot here, more hot than I could have imagined and it is also humid, more humid than I could have imagined, and this isn’t a caffeine free kind of culture and I’ve taken to drinking the occasional Fanta or 7Up or weird Vietnamese canned non-carbonated orange drink.

My Son is just outside of Hoi An so it didn’t take long for Owen to deposit us at our accommodations for the night: the River Beach Hotel, which is situated along the river and beautiful. Our room had sliding wooden doors that opened onto the river and a good bed, a much better bed than we’d had for days. Before we could commit fully to that relationship, we had agreed to meet Owen for dinner with his new tour group as our time with him had come to an end. He was taking an Israeli family of five back along the same route he had just taken us and suggested we all have dinner together. We met at an East Indian restaurant downtown called Namaste and which I would recommend to anyone visiting Hoi An. We’ve had so much excellent food, but this is the first restaurant whose name I recognize well enough to recommend because it isn’t a Vietnamese word. Dinner was hilarious. Father, mother, 16-year-old, 14-year-old and 6-year-old. The 6-year-old wanders and tinkers with electronics. One minute he was at the table, the next he was out on the street, the next he was playing with the restaurant manager’s laptop. He only eats fried foods and it was interesting to see Owen process what his next seven days would be like. I sat and chatted with the 14-year-old, Maia, about her experiences in school and traveling and in her family. She knows Hebrew, English and Arabic and would like to know French because she cannot imagine it not being fun to learn anything. She appreciates that her parents have given her the opportunity to see parts of the world. They most often go to Europe because it is very close and less expensive than some other places, like the United States. She said she likes to travel because then she can see that there are so many different ways for people to be good in the world and hearing that, my heart melted. While I was talking with her, Chris was learning that in order to get to Vietnam, Israelis must travel north to Moscow and connect there because El Al doesn’t fly over the Middle East for safety and security reasons. As much as travel enriches us, so do does meeting other travelers. It was a raucous, long dinner but it was a delight talking to Maia and her family about their lives. It gave me much to think about when I laid my head down on that excellent bed.