Son My not My Son

Up at 6 for a walk along the beach before breakfast, it had rained in the night! We left a 8.15 and by 8.25 we were visiting another Cham tower just outside the town.

Another long bus ride, with plenty to look at, heading to Hoi An. We saw rice paper discs, rice and grasses for mats all drying in the sun and lots of work going on in the rice paddies and hay fields as well as a million other interesting things to look at.

We were supposed to be heading to My Son, the most important Cham intellectual and religious centre between the 4th and 13th centuries and a World Heritage Site. However, we made an unscheduled detour to - confusingly - Son My Memorial Park, which was the site of the My Lai massacre on 16 March 1968 when US soldiers indiscriminately killed 504 men, women and children of the small hamlets of Son My village, The most shameful chapter of US involvement in Vietnam, it was more than a year before the story become known to the world. Apart from a small exhibition of memorabilia and shocking photographs the site is a peaceful, almost ghostly garden with the foundations of each family's house marked and the number of each family killed. Boot-prints and bare footprints are set into the concrete paths. Rather like visiting Auschwitz, the whole is a necessary stark reminder of man's inhumanity to man. The only US solder injured that day deliberately shot himself in the foot to avoid having to participate in the killing. One GI's mother put it simply: 'I gave them a good boy, they made him a murderer.'

We lit incense sticks and placed them at the foot of the monument, a mother cradling a dead baby, defiantly raising a fist.

We didn't then have time to go to My Son, so we had a late quick lunch of Pho Ba - beef noodle soup - and headed into the traffic and over more potholed roads straight to Hoi An. Frances and I want to see My Son, so we are going with our guide Hai at 7.30 tomorrow, hope to be back by 1 for the rest of the afternoon and evening in Hoi An, which is a delightful small town and I wish we had more time here.

Things we've seen carried on scooters today:

A double bed frame balanced between two scooters
Several pigs in baskets
A large pane of glass tied flat on the back seat
A chest of drawers
Bags of sand
2 fridges (on the same scooter!)