The year our family traveled the world: Danang and Marble Mountain

After our interesting overnight train trip from Mui Ne to Danang, we arrived in the third largest city in Vietnam keen to see the sites. First off, we went to the Cham museum where artifacts from the Cham dynasty are housed. The Cham were Hindus and the original settlers of the area and very pervasive up until the Vietnam war when they were fairly heavily persecuted.

One of thousands of jars of old coins that were discovered

More coins

After the museum, we managed to communicate to our driver that we wanted to stop for lunch but were racing by places too fast to judge which was which. I saw one place with a lot of tables and looked quite busy so pointed at that and said stop. We piled into the restaurant to discover it was fully Vietnamese and nobody spoke a word of English and no menus. No issues for me as I'll eat pretty much anything but things were looking grim for Jen and the kids that are generally more fussy - although to give Rachel credit, she's been getting a lot more adventurous and quite enjoys a bunch of Vietnamese foods. I asked for my old Vietnamese standby Pho (iPho in Shawnspeak) but they indicated it was a set menu and just started bringing stuff. Huge plates of bean sprouts, lettuce and all sorts of other leafy vegetables and big triangles of what looked like rice noodles and about 4 different types of sauces in small dishes. Jen indicated that it would be just her and me so they didn't bring stuff for the kids (although you could feed an army on what we got). Then our waiter started to peel off the flat rice noodles using a kind of rice paper until he had a 4x8 inch sheet of rice paper stuck to a similar sized triangle of rice noodle. To this he added a bunch of veggies and sliced pork and then rolled it up into a kind of spring roll... dipped it in the most foul smelling fish sauce and made eating motions with it.

Well, I'm not big on fish generally but I thought, I'd give it a shot... and was it ever tasty! Next thing I knew, we were all diving in and Jen ordered more for the kids. Shawn stayed away from the veggies but liked the pork and rice noodles along with a crispy pita type bread with sesame seeds that they brought. Our whole lunch came to under $4 for all of us - including drinks! The restaurant was also hosting some sort of large work party where the dinners would stand up every minute or so and shout out some sort of a loud toast. It was quite entertaining. So our first real Vietnamese meal (other than the Pho we had in Saigon) and we all enjoyed it. I wish I knew what it was called.

Danang has almost always been in my consciousness as I can remember news reports of it when I was very young during the nightly casualties reports. Danang was the US base with the most activity and where most GI's flew in to our out of from the mainland. At one time, it was the busiest airport in the world moving over 2500 flights an hour! (That's a takeoff or landing on average of every 0.7 seconds... think about that... 42 takeoffs/landings every minute). Most airports are considered pretty busy when they have 2 minutes between flights (and may double that if they are running with two runways concurrently).

It was also the site of the largest helicopter base in Vietnam and many combat tours began and ended in Danang as the Huey's would pickup and discharge their loads of troops here. It is situated south of the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) which was set on the 17th parallel during the Saigon Treaty (see my previous post on the subject) and has a good natural harbour so was a good site for the US to setup camp so to speak. There isn't much left these days but a few hangers at the airport and at the former helicopter base on the south side of the city that you can see in the photo's below.

They seem to be completely unused. I was surprised how close to the hangers they had set the walls... presumably there were barb wire fences etc further out but this was the main road we were on and I doubt it was rerouted as many of the buildings on it looked like they predated the war.

We'll see more remnants of the war as we head up to Hue (site of the Hue Massacre that I'll describe when we get there) but it was a bit sobering that most of the nearly 400,000 troops that were in Vietnam at the height of the war would have went through this place and there is very little left to show for it.

After we passed the airbase, we headed for the Marble Mountains which are a group of five mountains that seem to rise from the flat rice plains around Danang magically. The group includes Kim Son (Mountain of Metal), Moc Son (Mountain of Wood), Thuy Son (Mountain of Water), Hoa Son (Mountain of Fire), and Tho Son (Mountain of Earth). Several Buddhist temples have been built into the caves and grottoes, and it's a popular pilgrimage site. We went to Tho Son pictured below.

There were two ways to get up this one... you could take an elevator up (about halfway) or trudge up the stairs. The way up the stairs cost 75 cents and the way up the elevator was $2.50 so I immediately said we'd take the stairs but then had to listen to Jen snipe at me that I wasn't being forced to climb the mountain by her (apparently someone told her about my blog entries saying she's been dragging us on mountain climbing expeditions :-) ).

The stairs were fairly steep, but the views from the top were well worth it and frankly, the elevator only got you to the bottom level anyway and I would have felt completely ripped off if we'd taken it (not that it ever entered my mind!). We were greeted at every level by a Vietnamese lady (monkess?) selling incense and helping point out the sculptures. The mountains themselves are full of caves both from natural sources and from excavating the marble they use to make sculptures and tombstones. These caves were even used during the war as a temporary hospital for one side or the other (never did find out which).