Out in the jungled outskirts of central Vietnam, where the trees grow thick and the air hangs heavy with heat, you’ll find My Son. It’s not just another set of ruins, though at first glance it might feel that way. This was once a sacred place, a cluster of Hindu temples built by the Champa Kingdom between the 4th and 13th centuries—a thousand years of people carving stone, worshipping gods, building a civilization that eventually fell and left these remnants behind.
The carvings are still there if you look close enough. Figures worn by time, intricate patterns etched into brick and stone, ghosts of a culture that thrived long before anyone had ever heard of Vietnam as a country. Of course, history wasn’t kind to My Son. During the Vietnam War, American bombers hit it hard, and you can still see the scars—craters in the earth, temples split open, half-destroyed walls. It’s the kind of juxtaposition you get all over this country: beauty, history, devastation, resilience, all mashed together in one frame.
I’ll be honest—walking through My Son is brutal. The sun doesn’t just shine here, it presses down on you, relentless, like it’s testing your willpower to keep moving. Within an hour, I was dripping sweat, dizzy, and damn near ready to collapse. Heat stroke was knocking on the door, and the only thing standing between me and total defeat was a bottle of water and, later, a mercifully cold ice cream from a vendor just outside the site. Sometimes that’s the highlight—an ice cream cone in the middle of nowhere, keeping you alive long enough to appreciate what’s in front of you.
Is it touristy? Sure. You’ll see the buses, the crowds, the guidebooks. But look past that and you’ll find something worth your time: a piece of history still standing strong despite everything—time, weather, bombs, neglect. My Son isn’t polished, it isn’t easy, and it doesn’t hand you its meaning neatly wrapped with a bow. You’ve got to sweat for it, walk for it, and suffer a little in the heat to feel it.
But that’s the point. Some places aren’t meant to be comfortable. They’re meant to challenge you, to make you stop and think about how small you are in the timeline of human history. And if you can do that while half-delirious from the sun, dripping sweat, eating ice cream in the ruins of a temple complex older than most countries? Well, that’s not a bad day.
