My Son's strong points are its remarkable history and its jungle setting. I visited it on the back of a moto from Hoi An, an hour's drive away. During the day busloads of tourists are dropped off here, probably overcrowding the site as it is pretty small.

I arrived at 8.45 a.m. when there were maybe 10 other people around. To get to the site, you have to walk on a path through the jungle for the last couple of hundred meters - a real pleasure in itself, finding something so wild in heavily populated Vietnam. I heard many birds, and saw wonderful butterflies and hummingbirds.

The temples are really ruined, only at the first part of the complex (groups B and C) they are standing upright though also heavily damaged. The damage comes from bombing during the Vietnam War (you can still see the craters), but also from age. Most of the interior decorations and sculptures have been taken from here to the Champa museum in Da Nang. Only a couple of them are on show now here, at temples D1 and D2. From these sparse remains, one can only guess what they might have looked like in their heydays.

Because of the damage and I think also because of the use of brick, the temples look pretty crude. Most of the outlying temples are even worse off: they are overgrown or blown up into bits and pieces.