Just out of DaNang we stopped at Marble Mountain. The van pulled up at a workshop where we hoped to see some artisans sculpting marble, but we were soon surrounded by sales people eager to move us into the shop where grand marble sculptures sold for exorbitant prices. They were quite pushy, much more so than anything we had encountered elsewhere in Vietnam, and we hurriedly left the shop and crossed the road to Marble Mountain. It was a relief to get away from them.
The regular ascent up the mountain was by climbing hundreds of steps, so we took the easy way out and asked our guide to buy tickets for the elevator instead. We found ourselves in a Buddhist sanctuary. There were some ornate temples and shrines to Buddha, and a series of large caves to visit. In many of the caves were more Buddha statues and shrines. Apparently this was once a hiding place for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, when they were fed by Buddhist monks as they hid deep in the many caves. We found a few bullet holes in one of the gates.
We returned to our van via the steep steps. It was a lot easier going down that it would have been going up.
