When culture and religion meet light hiking and scenery, good things happen.
The Marble Mountains are located in the middle of Vietnam, near a city named Da Nang (that I reached in no short journey) and make for great photo opportunities whilst also enjoy a bit of hiking, and caving to boot.
Inside Tang Chon Cave.
As I travelled there during Tet, there was no entry fee and locals will all offer you parking in return for you buying a souvenir from them (or more realistically, just paying them 10,000VND – about 0.45USD).
The layout of the grounds – cave number 6 was inaccessible during my visit.
The mountains are fairly spread out, but the central peaks are the ones where most of the easily accessible caves and Buddhist temples are. You can, of course, hire tour guides to take you around the slopes, but true to my solo-traveller self, I struck it alone and wandered freely from photo opportunity to picturesque landscape.
The largest cave: Huyen Khang.
The biggest discovery I got to make was the presence of a small back entrance/exit to Dong Van Thong cave – you literally squeeze up and out to find an alternative route to the top of the smaller peak of the two closely standing mountains.
Although I use the word ‘hike’ to describe ascending the mountains, it is really just small series of steps that take you from level to level (unless of course your find a path off the beaten track – these are more large, broken rocks and boulders). It still doesn’t make for an overly easy journey, but it certainly doesn’t require all out hiking gear to conquer.
Overall?
The view from the tallest peak.
The site is well worth a walk-around (even despite the hordes of tour groups that grace its grounds) and the view once you reach the highest peak is certainly rewarding. Even if you are not big on religion, there is much to interest and photograph, I am truly glad that I spent an afternoon exploring the area – preparing provisions, grabbing photographs, and prevailing over continual steps to higher ground are more than enough to delight even the hardest parts of my soul.
Sleeper Express trains may not be the fastest method of travel in Vietnam, but my camera argues for using them.
This post has been heavily delayed due to work stress and laziness – as it turns out, I’m only human after all. For Chinese New Year at the start of February (known as Tet in Vietnam), and the mandatory week off that it afforded, I made a slightly last-minute choice to travel to Da Nang and stay for just over 4 days in the coastal city.
Courtesy of Google Maps.
The reasons I wanted to travel by plane were: my general hatred of airport security, wanting to see more of Vietnam’s landscape, and having no particular hurry to arrive in Da Nang. The journey by plane is around 2 hours in total; the journey by train for me was at least 17 hours. Comparing prices from online booking, a ticket for the SE5 train south was 846,000VND (around 38USD) and the SE14 north to Hanoi was 998,000VND which works out at around 45USD; a return plane ticket was around the 2,000,000VND mark, although some friends had managed to book tickets for a cheaper price with early booking. There were several travel options available for trains, with the main choice being between sleeper cabins or standard seating. Being the snob that I am, I opted for a soft-sleeper cabin which could house 4 people, rather than a standard coach seat. If you do travel with 3 other friends, I cannot recommend highly enough sharing your own cabin; as a solo traveller choosing to share a cabin, your entire journey experience may come down to sheer pot-luck. In retrospect, a plane journey should have been my first choice for going solo, but now at least I have crossed an extra item off of my Vietnam-to-do-list and attained some degree of bragging rights in the process.
Train Times – definitely not short journeys.
I left Hanoi from the Central Train Station at 9:00am on a Saturday morning – it was a simple case of flagging down a motorbike taxi (xe om) from near my apartment and making sure I had plenty of time to settle into my cabin and prepare for the journey ahead. The cabins were cosy, yet comfortable enough given the conditions that could be expected. I brought a sleeping bag to use as a blanket, but small pillows and blankets were provided, however, I cannot attest to their hygiene and did not see much bedding being regularly replaced with fresh sheets. Each carriage had its own washroom with sinks and Western-style toilets, but the good ol’ long drop could still be found in a carriage, or two. Each cabin had a central window, table, and power sockets on the far wall flanked by bunk beds. There was a limited ventilation system and small reading lights for each bed as well. The SE5 was seemingly an older train that creaked and grated like a great big, insatiable, blue worm of Meccano undulating its way through the countryside. The regular jolts and shudders didn’t make for the easiest of trips into dreamland.
As for the inhabitants of my cabin, there was one inmate that made the experience more like being trapped in a cell and less of being in the lap of relaxation. I wouldn’t say that I am the type of adult to despise children, but my job as a teacher means that I am regularly interacting with loud children and being paid to do so, in the process. To have to spend my free time listening to screaming, shouting and kicking from an uncontrolled delinquent, in the accompaniment of their parent, is not something I gladly partake in. For most of my 17 hours, or so on the SE5, I had the pleasure of a 4-6 year-old boy screaming out loud for no apparent reason, crying, kicking the door to the cabin and running around the corridor. The only time that silence was heard (ignoring the groan of the train) was when the demonic being lost his will to be infuriating and fell asleep (after which he woke his father up and demanded attention). Never have my travel notes from a trip seemed so full of murderous intent.
When not in my cell, I wandered the train looking for things to photograph, listened to music, slept what little I could, and grabbed a small plastic red chair from a storage area and sat near the exit doors to read my Kindle. It is rare that I have so much free reflective time to myself, but such a magnitude of hours in one sitting is more testing than it is refreshing.
Exhausted and world-weary, I happily set foot in Da Nang by 1:30am and headed straight for my hotel to embrace a pillowy peacefulness of silence.
Train Journey 2: The Trackening
SE14 cabin interior.
Filled with an apprehension of what may lie ahead, I waited at the train station seemingly in another dimension of consciousness; the one that only exists before 5am on a weekday. The SE14 had a surprisingly welcome wooden-themed interior and was definitely a bit smaller than its SE5 brethren, but also decidedly quieter in its movement along the tracks. As if to grace me with forgiveness for my previous journey, fate had it so that I was the only soul in the cabin for a great portion of my 21 hours back to Hanoi. Never before have I had so much sleep in a 24-hour period. Despite missing the sunshine that graced the world outside the cabin, I could relax, read, and listen to music in my own world away from lesson-planning and deadlines.
The holy trinity of entertainment – an old phone, iPod and Kindle.
Just so that life didn’t make things too perfect an experience, my small Nirvana was regularly interrupted by food and snack carts, with shuffling creatures that would bang on doors and often open them to offer you food, only to leave the door open in their wake. Pretty much leaving unwelcome light and sound greedily flooding in.
Once back in Hanoi, it was an emotional reunion with my apartment and a bed that had probably been stationary longer than I had been an adult for.
Overall?
Nothing does sleep deprivation quite so well, like a holiday of travel in a foreign country; sleep is the currency we pay for adventure with. Quite frankly, this trip is definitely a waste of hours that could be spent at a destination city, but it does offer something different to the more cold-cut efficiency of air travel. Watching the paddy fields and mountains roll away past your window is akin to a painted canvas moving through a frame on an art gallery wall.
Was it stressful? Yes. Was I extremely drained? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably not.
I have to prefix this blog post by stating that I am nothing akin to resembling a morning person and I had had 3 hours of sleep before heading out to experience the wonders of the mausoleum and its accompanying museum. The Mausoleum houses the preserved corpse of Ho Chi Minh, a leader who founded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. During weekdays, the Mausoleum is only open until 12pm and I had currently avoided seeing it until recently from sheer laziness. Having passed the site numerous times, I was confident in my ability to rock up without so much of plan and blitz the grounds from 10am, with a mouth full of gritted determination and a decisive shutter finger. Apparently, reality had other plans for my arrival. Finding motorbike parking next to a roundabout close to the Mausoleum that cost me a whole 5,000 VND (<$0.25 US), I confidently dismounted my scooter only to end up becoming a bird at the window of a bakery. Despite seeing lines of visitors walking across the grounds and an uninterrupted line of sight to the building, I couldn’t discern where this mystical portal allowing entry could possibly be. After asking a security guard and following signs for a few blocks, I eventually found the road to petrification.
Courtesy of Google Maps. The red route is the ‘son-of-a-bitch walkway.’
As a general description of the route from the entrance of the grounds to the exit of the Mausoleum – it was a fairly linear path with just a slight semblance of freedom of choice along the way. I couldn’t help feel that it was a rather apt representation of what the building itself championed.
After a seemingly pointless security check, where not a single pat-down of a patron was given after a conspicuously loud metal scanner alarm, I received a rather fetching temporary handbag and parted ways with my backpack as it chilled in the bag check area.
Although the route through the site was scenic enough from the decoration of foliage and glimpses of the Ho Chi Minh Museum, it was another chore en route to the main event and the images of singing elderly men playing on television screens along the way were of little interest. Once upon the route to the Mausoleum proper, it was now time to say goodbye to the fleeting love that adorned my arm and part ways with the camera that we had supported, together. Strangely enough, it was requested that any professional cameras were checked into the holding shack, but we were allowed to keep hold of any phones. Seemingly, security guards shouting at anyone who tried to use their phones were deemed a suitable deterrent (to my annoyance after trying to contact a friend.)
When you finally reach the foot of the monolithic building, it is hard to feel anything other than distaste at such an unapologetically hideous looking creature of stone. Once inside, the plastic red carpet leads you through the bowels of the building and into the chamber of Ho Chi Minh’s death-slumber, with nought but solemn stares and silence to fill the air. Whilst I am no stranger to preserved body parts and specimens, the perversion behind this setup was a little disturbing, like the Victorian death portraits, but a live-action peepshow of which we were all perverts vying for a fix of the dire. Shuffling along the edges of the chamber, my eyes alternated between the orange-lit, domed head of Ho Chi Minh and the numerous guards in white, serving their master in his afterlife.
Exiting the spying booth, the daylight had a hard, judging light to it, but once reunited and reconciled with my departed camera it was onto the next – for the first time in my visit to the site I was given an actual option on how to advance onwards: ‘left to the museum and One Pillar Pagoda’ or ‘right to the Presidential Palace.’ I’d hate to ruin a surprise, but both paths take you back to the exit of the grounds; the choice leading right, however, lets you pay 40,000 VND (under $2 US) to see the housing buildings of the deceased president before reaching the exit.
Fully saturated in the vat of lucidity that comes with sleep deprivation, a lot of the photographs and information dotted about the presidential grounds held little attention or interest, but once pointed straight towards the One-Pillar Pagoda and Ho Chi Minh Museum, spirits were greatly lifted – not only freedom to wander and to photograph, but to also mill about and observe the different, and often colourful, groups of tourists.
With only 20 minutes to view the museum and make it back to the original bag check before 12pm, there was 0 to none opportunity to take in the information on display inside the museum and with a brisk pace and discerning eye for photographs, it was a whistlestop affair. To my shock and surprise, the museum was full of art displays and alternative pieces inspired by the history of Vietnam – it was a welcome contrast to the grey and gothic scenes that had come just before.
Accidentally exiting via the car park and not the front of the building, I managed to dodge a motorbike tour salesmen, load up with my bag again and trek back to my scooter for a ride straight to land of dreams before I had to start work in the evening. Thankfully, it wasn’t a nightmare making my way there.
Overall?
Living here, in Vietnam, it is pretty imperative that I discover and learn about the local culture and history that I am clearly benefitting from, but learning from the Mausoleum itself may need only be a one-shot deal to that end; the Ho Chi Minh Museum itself was really intriguing and it was such a shame that I had to the former, only to be briefly introduced to the latter. The museum is also open in the afternoons and I’d be perfectly happy to frequent it again with my camera and a head filled with rest and patience. Considering the fact that the only part of touring the grounds paid for was the Presidential Palace, it isn’t the worst attraction I have ever encountered, but as far as unintentionally creepy opportunities to experience local culture go: you are a great ruler, Ho Chi Minh.
With these guys; it was pretty much written in stone.
After spending the morning rushing around the city and generally getting lost, I decided to do something with my only second consecutive day off since starting work here in Hanoi. Making sure to charge my camera, I headed out late in the afternoon, to have my roommate tell me that the temple closed at 4:30pm so I’d better hurry; thankfully for me, that didn’t seem to be the case. The temple itself was pretty easy to find thanks to Google maps and my ability to locate a sizeable city block dedicated to a single collection of buildings. Lying just south of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, the Temple of Literature is a stark contrast to the rag-tag buildings and shops that pepper its circumference. Navigating my way to the parking area that was just to the left of the main entrance gate, on the south face of the block, I wasted no time in finding the ticket booth. I was surprised to see even this late into a chilly and slightly wet December afternoon, that there were many people still walking around the site. Entrance costs for a single, adult ticket were 30,000 VND (around US$1.33) and I picked up a leaflet for another 8,000 VND (US$0.40) which gave a little information and context to the site, but more than that I was greatly impressed by its durability – it had seemingly been printed onto laminated paper and would seemingly give non-tear playing cards a run for their money.
The Temple of Literature, or as the site was known: Quoc Tu Giam, was originally the first National University of Vietnam, constructed in 1076. The University taught students in the ways of Confucianism so that they may become doctor laureates and mandarins (I believe that is not the fruit.)
It was the tourist, in the garden, with a camera…
Walking through the first doorway of the site, named the Great Portico, you can’t help but to admire the rectangular symmetry that runs throughout the grounds; from the courtyards to the door frames, 4 sides and 90-degree angles are king. Veering around tourists and loved-up couples I rushed to photograph as much as possible before security or remaining daylight decided to end my day for me, as it turns out, I need not have worried so much. Although the gardens were clearly well looked after, the grey of the sky and the lack of warm temperature seemed to add a lifeless edge to the plant life present. Although there were some flower displays before the Great Middle Gate, there was a real lack of vibrant colour and especially of life in the four ponds of the garden before reaching Khue Van Pavillion. Shaking off thoughts of being a crime scene photographer I carried on, to the majestically named 82 Doctor Stelae, and the Well of Heavenly Clarity (it was not crystal clear, I would also add.)
The stelae were literally records in stone of the Doctors that graduated the University from 1442 to 1779 and of great pride to Confucian scholars, they have at least seemingly lasted the ages.
Let me check in the back for you.
Moving deeper into the grounds, you come to the Courtyard of the Sage Sanctuary which greets visitors with an intricate metal urn featuring three dragon heads twisting to the sky flanked by snaking dragons facing the bottom of the urn. Once again, the symmetry of the courtyard was beautiful, but it seemed sparse and barren. The courtyard was hugged by gift shops on each side and stared down by large rectangular building containing statues and a gold plated tortoise. There was no need to take shoes off and the staff were surprisingly relaxed about tourists taking pictures and walking around the entire building. It would seem that ceremony, more so than religion, was the general thought in place.
Heading back out into the courtyard, I followed a rather ominous sign and trail to the final segment of the grounds – Thai Hoc Gate and Thai Hoc Courtyard.
The courtyard here was even more lacklustre than its predecessors, but the real gem here was inside the main building at the far side of it – a few more gift stalls, but also more information on the site and its history, and numerous statues and displays with a great deal more grandeur to them. The highlight of an earlier building was a gold plated tortoise – here each statue on the upper level was gold plated. Left to my own devices, I casually wandered around the ground floor taking photographs and then graduated to the upper floor where there was a garish display of gold and colour. If colour had been shared across the site, I would say that the upper floor of the final building had stolen it from the gardens and earlier courtyards – or perhaps it was left as a reward for those willing to seek out the sight.
Taking an opportunity to step out onto a balcony, the fading light outside still did not damper my mood as I looked out over the grounds surrounding either front corner of the building. Unfortunately, the noise from the city could still penetrate the contrasting peacefulness of the temple, but my desire to see something new had been sufficiently satiated. Being one of the few visitors left on site, I made my way for the car park at around 5:30pm and had the pleasure of paying a hefty 5,000 VND (US$0.22) for being the last person to reclaim their bike.
Overall?
Whether a solo tourist, madly-in-love couple or a sheep on a tour, the Temple of Literature is definitely worth seeing; if not to learn about the history and culture of Vietnam, then at least to take some shameless selfies to show how world-cultured you are. There are plenty of benches lining the courtyards and gardens, so if you want to sit and people watch, the world is your goldfish bowl. You can attempt to learn how best to take photographs in low-level settings; chat to the air, and your lover, about how seemingly poetic it is that the trees so twisted and gnarled in an ugly way appear indisputably beautiful; then again, maybe you just like to be part of a garbled squad of cameras herded from one pen to the next by a knowledgeable shepherd – in either case, a total cost of 43,000 VND (under 2 US dollars) for entry, basic information and parking, isn’t going to break the bank and certainly isn’t worse than doing something meaningless elsewhere.
Accidentally Wayfaring 