Montagnes de Marbre

We've loved our homestay and Hoi An so much, we decided to do a day trip to Da Nang instead of staying there a night. There's a famous park called Ba Na hills which has a very famous Buddha hands bridge which is all over Instagram. We wanted to go, but the entrance fee alone to the park was £60 each! So we opted for a cheaper tour to a place called monkey and marble mountain.
At monkey mountain there was a pagoda surrounded by beautiful gardens, the tallest lady Buddha in all of south East Asia, and most exciting for me, monkeys! They were so cute, jumping between trees, wresting in the garden and one was sat astutely on the bin, claiming any goodies that people dropped in. Some tourists were getting way too comfortable around them, and I saw a few monkeys take a couple of well deserved swipes at those annoying people.
We then visited marble village which was just a big selection of marble statues, then a shop with lady's following you around, trying to get you to buy something. Marble mountain was better, we first descended into 'hell', a cave full of cool statues and shrines illustrating the 18 levels of hell. Our tour guide Micheal was very animated, and brought the cave to life for us. We then ascended 250 stairs up to 'heaven'. Along the way there were some nice arches, we passed through heaven's gate, visited a nice view point but my favourite of the whole trip was Hoa Nghiem Cave. It was a large cave with small openings at the top, the sunlight poured through the gaps in huge beams, looking almost like a waterfall or a spotlight, depending on how imaginative you are.
In the afternoon, back in Hoi An, we hopped on the bikes again, this time taking a beautiful detour through the rice fields to a lovely hidden away cafe. It had loungers and cushioned chairs sheltered under umbrellas looking out over the fields of already harvested rice. There was water buffalo grazing in the distance, two of which escaped their ropes and came to munch on the green weeds right next to where we were sitting. There were also lizards which sparkled gold in the sun, sunbathing and running on top of the dead grass, one even popped his head up under my leg!
We could've stayed there for hours on end but we headed back before it got dark. Unfortunately I haven't really seen any spectacular sunsets since being away, Thailand and Laos were too smokey and the sun in Vietnam seems to dip behind a bank of clouds most nights before setting. Tonight was no different, but the evening light was still lovely.
We wandered into town and did some shopping of things we'd been eyeing up the previous three nights. Kath got a north face bag and patagonia bag, then I got some thin trousers, a shirt and a silver necklace ( I lost my nice one:( ).
For dinner we got a set menu of local dishes including Hoi An speciality white rose dumplings and cao lau noodles. The dishes were nice but a few lacked flavour, but nothing a bit of soy sauce and chilli couldn't fix.Read more