Vietnam 11 - Marble Mountains

One of the tourist sites in the general area here is a place known as Marble Mountain. 

Marble Mountain is actual a cluster of five hills mostly full of marble and limestone.  Hence the name.  

They are named after the five elements namely metal, water, wood, fire and earth.  The site is ancient full of caves and sites for worship.  Water mountain is the one made accessible to visitors, and might be the largest.  It is certainly the one set up to receive tourists.

The location is about halfway between Da Nang and Hoi An, and for some reason we thought it would be a good idea to book two Grab motorcycles to make the trip.  For the uninitiated Grab is the local version of Uber and you can request either a car or a motor scooter (cheaper, but good only for one passenger).  Turns out this is a fairly long way to sit on the back of a scooter, and we ended up taking an A/C Grab car home.

Beautiful Gateways

The entrance area to mountain is filled with small shops selling souvenirs (mostly small marble statues and bead necklaces and bracelets).  The streets in the area are also filled with large scale statues for outside, or I suppose for a large indoor worship location.  These are mostly various life size or larger statues of Buddha in various forms.  Marble was historically mined in the area (and from the mountains) but no longer.  Our understanding is all that marble stuff seen at the base actually comes from China, though this remains unconfirmed.

This Buddha was not inside a cave

There is an elevator that can hoist you about halfway up the mountain which we thankfully took.  The views from the elevator top are quite nice of the nearby beach, though the view of the hotel construction also going on along the beach was less inspiring.

View to the beach (not showing the construction)

Throughout the top there are a series of caves set up as Buddhist and Hindu grottoes.  There are also a large number of pagodas.  

Many of these lovely pagodas

Marble mountain has been a center for worship since ancient times, and some of what is currently there is very old – some pagodas are several hundred years old.  These grottoes are still in use for worship. Most had incense burning and we would see people come in and pray at most of the locations.  In many ways it was similar to viewing churches in Europe with candles available, and pews etc for a more meaningful visit.

A beam of light from a roof opening shines on these statues of men playing a game

On a more recent historical note this area was also used as a hospital for the Vietcong during the Vietnam/American war.  An interesting point of this is that from the various viewpoints here one can look to the beach where American soldiers did their R&R, and had an airfield.  Remember the old TV series “China Beach”?

Small nooks for prayer abound

Walking around the site was a bit of an adventure – many, many stairs (the elevator only went halfway up).  All the stairs uneven and slippery since they were from marble, which over time had gotten polished enough to be a bit diabolical.  I was wearing runners with a good tread but even with those I had to step cautiously.  There were even a few places where we had to climb with hands and feet to get to what we wanted to see.

This was a very large cave space

Same Buddha zoomed in

Many of the cave grottoes had openings in the roof that may have been natural, or may have been caused by bombs – both theories were floated out.  In any case the light coming in from these openings certainly illuminated the interior, and in some cases focused a beam of sunlight on a particular altar.  Might have been coincidence of course.

These holes in the roof

Resulted in a sunbeam directly on the box

All in all a beautiful and physical day.

Final coconut snack - first you drink it, then they open so you can scrape out the interior