Cows on the beach ! As you do !
Taking the route less traveled Ben found out about a place called Quang Ngai, that we could venture down to. Two reasons , it had another cracking beach that is relatively untouched and also we thought it about time to find out what the Vietnamese were saying about the American war in the very sobering place of Son My the site of the Mai lai village massacres.
Arrived by a/c bus and then had an interesting and slightly stressful time trying to get from where the bus had dumped us to My Kye Beach. Mainly trying to talk to Moto drivers and working out exactly where we are with out being ripped off . We are getting quite good at negotiating and standing ground now! It ended up we were about 12km from our destination, so off we went by motorbike past quang ngai through rural villages of Paddie fields and Agent orange scarred mountain tops, a quick reminder of the bombing and mass dioxin that the area had suffered only 30-40 years ago!
After some searching we came to what could be loosely termed a hotel. Nice enough but i am not going to go about recommending My Khy hotel. They do have a monopoly though of being the only hotel there !
We went straight off to Son My Museum. We were two of only a handful of tourists there , so the experience was very concentrated, there were no other visitors to hide behind when things got a bit tough! We had a personal guided tour of the area that used to be the Village of Mai Lai that has been painstakingly preserved back to the state it had been left after the massacre , including the paths showing a mixture of running footprints , bicycle tracks and heavy booted GI prints . It is the center of a huge war crimes atrocity, where a whole rural and fishing village of Mai lai was raided by the US early in the morning with the intent of not leaving anything or any one standing. The whole village of 504 people were killed tortured or raped. Animals, livestock, crops and houses were razed to the ground. Only a handful of people escaped. It was made all the more harrowing because our guide was from a village just a few Km away and her granddad and baby uncles were killed in the massacre, and the event was photographed with intimate detail by a US photographer and his photos were on display with all their grizzly detail.We were glad we went and would say anyone visiting here should go, it is a sobering experience. Due to the nature of where we were although you could take photos we didn't feel it right to do so , so i am afraid your are just going to have to go there yourselves to see it !
The evening and next day was spent negotiating menus as we were the only westerners there but we had great fun with the staff and our Vietnamese is coming on nicely , we can almost read a menu ! And we certainly are getting the very basics down in speech ! We went for an epic and uninterrupted walk along the beach as it was too hot to lay down!!
After 6 days of being out of contact with anyone we thought it about time to reacquaint ourselves with the modern world and got a most interesting train to Nha Trang , but that folks will be for our next journey in to the tour of the Turners !!!!!!...............
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