This morning we took a stroll down the road to the marble mountains and climbed the hundreds of very uneven stairs to get to the top of and around Thuy Son. It’s quite amazing to see these mountains just sitting in an otherwise absolutely flat landscape. Also crazy to see the huge number of marble sculpture outlets in the surrounding area – so many quite giant marble things for sale!

It was extremely hot and humid climbing about but we had a pretty great time! There were many small caves, grottos to explore and (of course) marble absolutely everywhere. The views from the upper parts were incredible. Rather strangely there was piped music all over the mountain – sort of modern middle-of-the-road Vietnamese music (occasionally ballady, occasionally poppy, occasionally a bit dancey, stuff you’d expect to hear on mainstream radio) – from speakers which were shaped like rocks. Definitely unexpected.

It was somewhat crowded with visitors and many of the (marble) stairs were quite treacherous and required a little wait-time, but everyone was pleasantly considerate of one another.

I took a huge number of photos, most of which I was dissatisfied with (really must sign up for that photography class!) – some of the more tolerable ones below: