The next morning we had woken up early due to my coughing. I ended up catching whatever cold Grant had in Seoul. Thankfully we still had some cold medicine leftover so I could make it through the day.

Our plan for the day was to visit My Son sanctuary and then head onto Hoi An. The drive to My Son felt easier than the day before, but we could tell the more inland we drove the hotter the temperature felt. After parking our motorbike and grabbing our tickets, we started our journey through the complex.

We saw there was a traditional Champa show starting in about 30 minutes so we headed in that direction. It was interesting to watch all the different tourists interact. There was a group of Asian tourists that came in at the last minute as the show was starting and tried to grab some chairs to sit down in and the amount of people yelling at them to sit down was amazing. You still had to maneuver around all the phones that were raised up in the air to get a view of the show. There were three different dances they performed but the best one was the flutist (which we unfortunately didn’t grab a video of). He ended with a long solo where he kept removing pieces of the flute until he was down to just the mouth piece, all while making continuous sound for well over a minute. His breath control was very impressive!

We moved through the temples stopping frequently in whatever shade we found as it was sweltering hot (though we would soon see how hot Cambodia would be). Even the locals kept telling us “Very hot!” It was impressive to see the signs of the before and after pictures of the restoration projects at the sanctuary. They were built around 11th or 12th Century depending on which grouping they were in and the brick structures did not use mortar like we are used to seeing. The other crazy thing to see was huge craters very close to a lot of the temples from US bombings during the Vietnam war. As you travel through Vietnam, there are always so many reminders of how intense and brutal that war was, even to this day.

After exploring the temples, we grabbed a quick snack at the restaurant before heading back to Da Nang. We had decided since I was feeling sick and it was so hot outside, we would skip Hoi An and relax the rest of the afternoon in our Airbnb.

On our way back to Da Nang, we stopped at the base of Marble Mountain and walked through the garden area. We had a local woman stop by and tell us we should go hike the mountain and she would show us the way as she lived up there. She waited for us to finish our walk through the area and tried to get us to follow her once we got to our motorbike. We had to politely tell her that we were going to save it for another day and headed out on the road.

Back at the Airbnb, it felt nice to be in air conditioning and relax. I was able to get a quick nap in, as I didn’t get the best sleep the night before, while Grant figured out our plans for the rest of the week. We ended up grabbing dinner at a local pho shop which I think was maybe only my second time trying pho. This place was really good! And it was the perfect meal on a day I was feeling sick. The place next door was an Obama themed restaurant – we had seen a number of Obama references by this point and read that it’s because of his 2016 visit to the country.

After dinner, we stopped by the pharmacy to grab some more medicine since we were low on cold medicine from Seoul. I was surprised after giving her my symptoms that she cut out three steroid tablets along with three allergy pills. Those pills plus a nasal rinse were only $3.50! And no prescription needed for the steroid.

We also ran into an American family from Long Beach living in Singapore who were visiting Da Nang for the week. His wife was from Indonesia and gave us a bunch of site seeing recommendations for Bali. And she again told us how much traffic there was in Bali, but they told us we would be used to it living in Los Angeles.