Middle- Nam

Bike to My Son

Little more than 55 kilometres from Hoi An lies the ancient Champa-built ruins of My Son. Built from the 4^th to 13^th centuries with its’ roots owed to Indian Hinduism, My Son was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

I skipped through a lot of country from Hanoi to be here, by way of two weeks spent helping a thankless invalid. I might have been on my way to Cambodia, as originally planned. But who sticks to an original plan these days? I hopped over going to mountains in Sapa, or running through caves in Ninh Binh, and stopped for a walk through Hue’s old war- ravaged citadel, on the way to historic Hoi An. The Viet 'Cong' (the American label for the guerrilla troops of South Vietnam and Mekong who fought alongside the the North Vietnamese), had given the yanks too much credit in assuming that they wouldn’t desecrate these momentous temples of Vietnamese religion and culture, in their bid to chase down Communism.

After 55km my dead bum was gnawing at the edges of my patience. The road traffic requires you to keep your eyes in your rear, rather than on the scenery. The Han River flows next to much of the road. Sisterly jade rice paddies and twisting train lines on the opposition side quench a thirst in your eyes for sights you never knew you’d missed. It was however, still a relief to roll up to this vast red brick sanctuary and, after falling off my bike, sooth my posterior back to life.

At the entrance a square squat hallway invited me in to pay and gain the background information, contrastingly modern against the Monkey Bridge out front, that lead the 2km to the great temple exhibition.

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A cacophony of grasshoppers played me down the lane to the first ruin. To walk on these stones is to step back in time. To walk in the foot-steps of past emperors and deities. How magical, to think of it all in former glory back in those early years.

Some of them, the temples, have been taken back by nature. Mounds of dirt and patchy grass grip at the bricks that peak out of their earthy tombs. Worn pathways and ancient rocks whisper to old pomp and ceremony. Giant craters in the fourth temple hint at the not so recent war between East and West. The final temple resembles a rollercoaster, all a jumble of hills and craters tale-telling on ghosts of the past.

I wondered exactly how much this place was bombed? Two shell cases sat beside an archaeological find inside a ruin. Juxtaposing spiritual enlightenment with western ideological fear. How much was destroyed in the name of preserving our current version of Genghis Khan's pillage, Capitalism?

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Holy places have a habit of making me wistful. I began to mull over whether I could ever leave Asia. Imagining myself another life where I am ‘settled’ requires decoding of the word itself. ‘To settle’. The verb defined in the Oxford dictionary with more than three meanings. Here are the top three: to reach a conclusion or agreement to a problem; to reach a decision; to come to a dissatisfactory acceptance.

To ‘settle down’ is to accept an unrealistic and bogus idea of existence. Even those who think their life is mapped out will find surprises, whether good or bad. And those whose definition of adulthood is based on ownership of some form (cars, careers, mortgages and kids for instance) are only defining their experience of the world through money and possessions.

I don’t think that the Cham emperors of the past, when building their red mortar worshipping grounds, would have ‘settled’.