Vietnam North to South – Day 13: Tây Ninh

We woke up early in the morning to pack our bags and hunt for breakfast outside the hotel. We vastly overestimated our non-verbal communication skills and sat down at a local restaurant in the hopes of ordering me a vegetarian dish. Unsympathetic to our struggle, the waitress kept frustratedly pointing at the menu on the wall, which was written entirely in Vietnamese and was unaccompanied by any pictures. I suppose it did not occur to her that two foreigners might penetrate as far as Tây Ninh without being able to string together a single sentence in the local language.

Instead of continuing in vain, we left and bought some banh mi from a street vendor. The nice thing about this way of ordering meals is that one can stand right next to the vendor and simply point at things to put inside the bread. The battle was only half-won, though, as we felt a little thirsty and my dad wanted to drink hot tea. The trouble is that most Vietnamese cafes seem to only offer iced tea, which is bizarre given the long history of tea culture in the country. By some fortunate accident, a visitor at the same café spoke some English and – after listening to our struggle for a few minutes – helped us place our apparently unusual order.

Following breakfast, we ordered a taxi to the Black Virgin Mountain, an extinct volcano that towers over the otherwise flat landscape. The star attraction of the mountain is a giant statue of the black virgin, a figure from Khmer and Vietnamese legends. Despite knowing of a gondola that leads to the top of the mountain, we were not prepared for the insane amount of tourist infrastructure recently constructed at the site: there was not one but at least four different gondolas around the mountain, and electric cars connected different sites at the base. Both top and bottom were also massively overstaffed, with workers directing visitors at every entrance and corner.

The next surprise came when we arrived in the upper station: The entire multi-storey pedestal of the virgin is threaded with escalators, as is the way down to the massive Maitreya Buddha. One need not break a sweat traversing all these altitudes, and I doubt most people do unless they pray with particular fervour. For this purpose, the complex contains several shrines in different national styles, including Tibetan. Within the pedestal, there are also several floors with exhibitions that bring together artefacts from various Buddhist communities around Asia. The uppermost floor exhibits a single relic brought all the way from India in a massive procession. It is currently exhibited within a glass tank that has bubbling water within its walls.

After visiting another temple at the foot of the mountain, we set out to find a taxi. Fortunately, there were a few in the parking lot, and we did not struggle to explain our destination since I saved the details of every place we wanted to visit. Once again, we headed to the Cao Dai Holy See, as we had missed the six o’clock ceremony the day before: we walked past a barrier and were not allowed back in again. This time, we arrived early and posted ourselves by the main entrance to watch the worshippers and priests trickle in – the former in white robes, the latter in robes of red, yellow, and blue, their hats denoting their status. We were not allowed inside for the ceremony but we could see the procession through the windows and hear the music from far away. Even the believers who were not inside the church stood up to face the building during one part of the ceremony.

We really lucked out on transportation today, as the moment we started looking for a taxi, our cab driver from the Black Virgin Mountain arrived out of nowhere, having just completed another errand. Once we were seated in his car, he typed a Vietnamese phrase into his translator and played it out loud: “Nice to see you again,” the mechanical voice boomed.

The last place we visited in Tây Ninh was Gò Kén Temple, an attraction known for its towering statue of Avalokiteshvara and its tall pagoda. However, the complex also contains several other attractions like a tunnel full of prayer wheels and a golden Maitreya. Since the temple is on the outskirts of the city and cabs are rather sparse in Tây Ninh, we asked the driver to wait ten minutes before taking us back to the hotel. As all other drivers we have stopped on our journey, he did not run a loss the day he met us.

There was only one place left to see that day, and it brought us within a mile of Vietnam’s border with Cambodia. Just a slight detour from the road to Ho Chi Minh City lies the Tháp Cổ Bình Thạnh, an old Hindu tower built by the Óc Eo culture in the eighth century. While it is broadly similar to some of the Cham sights we have already seen on this trip, the tower in Bình Thạnh does have quite distinctive bas reliefs. It does not appear to be in active use by Hindus, though it has not been converted to a proper Vietnamese-style temple either; we saw just a few incense sticks, a statue, and some other religious accoutrements on the yoni base.