Ah, how I love the off-the-beaten-track WHS that confirm what Ivan and I always say: UNESCO takes you places. The drive from Bai Dinh should be a short one, it's about 50 kms, but the roads are not the best and go through municipal areas, so it's slow. We started early. Our driver took us to Vinh Luc where the citadel is located: we bought tickets at the ramp and the guard said we can enter by car, so we did. We spent some time at the museum containing artifacts discovered on site, then walked around the bank encircling the whole area - it's a square 1 km by 1 km. We climed on top of the three-arched gateway, walked under it, enjoyed the local scenery and then went on to see the Altar.

That took us some time to find, because even though it's marked on the maps, they are a bit deceiving. So we ended up walking up the hill to some homestay with many barking dogs in cages, with our driver talking to local owners who pointed us to the right direction. We entered the site through the green bank, past the careatker's house. He was in shorts and t-shirt, smoking pipe, I guess wondering what kind of fools have decided to have a look, talked to our driver and just waved for us to go and have a look. There are couple of levels to the whole structure, with the round altar at the top, but fortunately the whole site has info boards at different parts with text both in Vietnamese and English. Our driver had a look as well :) By the end of our exploration the caretaker, now dressed in his uniform, opened the temple for us, we had a look, signed the guestbook and left through the gate with fence having the UNESCO signs. It was an interesting visit, definitely. After that we continued on to visit the Tran An national park.