Nowadays the Cham are mostly muslim but judging by all the relics left in Vietnam you'd hardly have guessed it. The ancient pagodas and temples in this area all reminded us of India or Thailand which is more or less the origin of these people. The best of the sculptures are now located in Danang museum, some of them date back to the 7th century so they're pretty old. The site My Son is located not far from Hoi An and contains the remains of some pagodas, they're mostly bombed out shells where the jungle has taken root but they are now being restored if we understood rightly (at least there was some scaffolding around).
Hoi An is an old trading city which had remarkably strong links with China and Japan, many of the old buildings are still standing and we can see the Chinese influence. Much of the writing around the temples is in Chinese script (which of course we couldn't read) which was used by the Vietnamese until that French guy we wrote about earlier. Another thing that the French did in town was flatten the Japanese bridge to allow cards to drive over it, the bridge now has its hump back and is closed to traffic.
We enjoyed eating at Cafe 43 in town since it was the best value from money anywhere, stuffed squid was great as was the banana leaf grilled fish. Other places were not too bad but their prices were often double.
Oh and we were here for new year but cannot remember anything since we got drunk on a bottle of vodka before midnight - perhaps we are out of practice.
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