Back to Beyond

Just a short post to bridge the three or so hour gap between Hué and Hoi An, a little further down the coast, to which we drove via the old road, up and over the switchbacked pass instead of through the modern six kilometre tunnel in order to get the view from the top, except that the top was both in the clouds and parked up beyond comprehension on a Saturday morning, but that’s OK because we had a good view of the many little roadside shrines to everyone who’d gone off the road to an untimely reincarnation, so many in fact that they had to build a central roadside shrine to consolidate them all.

But our driver seemed steady, and our vehicle had seatbelts, so we felt safe. That has not always been the case. While people drive fairly slowly, they do it in a way that is a bit stressful to the uninitiated and that makes limited use of a number of modern automotive innovations. For example, lane assist technology is pretty much useless here, as it requires some pretty arbitrary assumptions about whose lane is who’s. And that flashing light on your side mirror that tells you if someone is in your blind spot is a bit pointless if you never look in your mirror. Or care if anyone is in your blind spot. In fact the entire concept of “blind spot” is clearly a western construct of some kind like stop signs or one way streets. Instead, all of one’s safety and navigational needs have been consolidated in the horn, blown not in anger or to get someone to get out of your god given way, but rather to alert the unwary to your presence and to give them a chance to share the pavement. Other than the horn, the only indispensable piece of equipment is a good mobile phone mount because, if you are going to update your contact list or watch videos of lions chasing prey across the veldt while driving like our driver in the mountains, you don’t want to be using some unsafe piece-of-crap mount.

So anyhow it was a nice drive, clouds notwithstanding. We passed by a barely inland lagoon where the local people fish for whatever fish like a combination of salt and fresh water. We passed through the city of Da Nang, with its dragon bridge over the river and its stunning small museum of amazingly well-preserved 1,000 year old statuary extracted by the French from a ruined set of Cham temple complexes in the surrounding hills (our guide allowed as how we could thank the French for finding the stuff and for building a museum here rather than shipping it straight back to the Louvre). And we visited the nearby Marble Mountains, which turn out to be so named because they are made of – wait for it – marble. There used to be five, but one has been used up and three of the others are somewhat reduced, but the fifth is OK because it has a series of temples somewhat entangled in banyan roots way up high so if you are willing to climb up a lot of spectacularly uneven steps you can pray, see the other three mountains and look out to the sea. You can also look down on the many many marble “workshops”, to which your guide will take you if you answer “yes” to the question “would you like to see how the craftsmen make all the marble statues”, because you would like to see how the craftsmen make all the marble statues, but you forget that the question “would you like to see how the craftsmen make all the marble statues” actually means “would you like to have the owner show you a lot of increasingly large and disturbing Buddhas, prancing stallions and tail-standing marble fish, each of can apparently be shipped to North America for almost no money, only to abandon you like yesterday’s fish guts when you turn down their offer of a visit to the gift shop”. How could I forget such obvious things?

But all in all a nice drive and a nice way to make a travel day into something more.