Monday, January 04, 2010

Vietnam Holiday - My Son Cham Ruins

Our holiday to Vietnam was a huge success for the whole family and we all want to go back again! We spent the week in the historic of town of HoiAn and did plenty of exploring of the town and the surrounding areas.

The Cham ruins of My Son , a UNESCO world heritage site is about an hour away from Hoi An. The ruins are a cluster of Hindu temples built between the 4th and 14th century A.D by Cham Kings. Not much is know about how the temples were built and it is still not known how the Chams actually made their bricks to build the towering temples. They were re-discovered by French explorers in 1898 and some restoration work was done in the next few decades. Unfortunately the ancient site did not escape the wrath of the Vietnam War and many buildings were destroyed by American carpet bombs.

Today it is a hugely visited tourist must-see and of course we arrived the same time as the tour buses. We had a tour guide - which we didn't know when we booked the car - and he was happy to talk and talk and we were happy to wander where he didn't want to go! A first for Iman on this holiday was to take her own pictures using my old point and shoot and she loved it and did very well taking plenty of good pictures. The first seven photographs taken below are all hers and I added a few of mine at the end.







The bomb shells above made the craters like the ones below.








3 comments:

Eileen said...

Great!!! pictures maria. thank you for giving us an a look in on the lives of the people in Vietnam.

Maria said...

Thanks so much Eileen. More to come soon.

Ms. Fawlty said...

Hello. I am wondering how to contact you if I want to write about you and hashing for my school blog. Please let me know. Thanks.