As I pointed out in a previous blog entry the Vietnamese are very skilled in various handicrafts with their skills ranging from cloth-tailoring to wood-carving and lantern-making, skills being passed down from family to family. One village where one can see these ample skills are the Marble Mountains between Hoi An and Da Nang in Central Vietnam. Half an hour from Hoi An one and only a few hundred meters away from the seashore the five mountains, less than 100 meters high each, were for a long-time the source of marble. The marble started a thriving industry of stone carvers and shops. On a normal day one can hear the deafening noise of Bosch hand drills working relentlessly on hundreds of Buddhas, lions, Virgin Maries and dolphins across town. The finishing touch is applied by the gentle hands of female workers sandpapering incessantly the surface of the sculptures. The final objects are then sold across the whole of Vietnam. Even though the marble comes now from the north of Vietnam (otherwise they would be no more mountains) the stone carving village grows almost weekly with new shops setting up shop and more and more marble being processed.
Besides being the center of Vietnamese stone-carving the Marble Mountains also house Buddhist temples on their peaks and some atmospheric caves in their wombs. We visited the mountains during a misty afternoon and we wandered around almost by ourselves with only a few Vietnamese tourists around. The various caves ranged from small to medium size and some housed simple temples and shrines. One bigger cave had a small temple inside and some dime daylight shone through a whole in the cave roof on its roof. We felt like in a Indiana Jones movie. Rusty and moss-covered gates let to scenic pathways and made us feel like entering a spiritual world. An efficient monk showed us where to donate incense to the male and astonishingly numerous female Buddhas.
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