LIVE – Marble Mountains, from Tam Thai Pagoda, in Da Nang, Vietnam

Explore the Tam Thai Pagoda in the Marble Mountains with me, LIVE in Da Nang, Vietnam. This wonderfully colorful pagoda is one of the few places on Mt. Thuy, in the Marble Mountains, where I could broadcast live.

You’ll get a good look at the brightly painted architecture, walk through the grand entrance gate, as well as get to walk around inside the pagoda to see the temple’s Buddha statues.

*On some of the links provided I might make a commission if you purchase something by clicking through my link. This creates no additional cost for you.

I managed to go at a time when I had the place to myself, so we have plenty of space to move around. It’s a very peaceful environment, but certainly not a boring one.

There will be another video that covers the whole of the Marble Mountains experience. This is an impromptu LIVE where I get to take you along with me to discover a new place – in this case, the Tam Thai Pagoda.

Join me, it’ll be fun.

Oh, and here’s the link for Darn Tough socks that I promised in the video. They’re the best:

Video Transcript

Hey, it finally worked.

Hey everyone, I am at the Marble Mountains in Da Nang, Vietnam and I will repeat that again in a few moments once everyone’s online. I wanted to show you stuff from inside the caves that are here, with all the statues and the temples, but there’s just no reception.

This is the first spot I have had reception on the whole mountain. So I am going to show you this wonderful courtyard I am in, and this wonderful structure here. It’s really cool and I will tell you a couple things about the Marble Mountains.

One, they are legendary. There are five Marble Mountains, but you can only actually climb up one. And I say climb up, there’s some stairs, but there’s also an elevator. Considering the number of stairs that are around to climb and to hassle with once you get up to the top, just take the elevator.

So to get into the Marble Mountains is normally about two US dollars, maybe a little bit less, but I think they’ve waived that fee. The elevator ride is another 50 or 60 cents. Today it was actually more, it was a buck -fifty or something like that, or a buck and a quarter. Either way, this is an easy day out from Da Nang. It’s only a few miles from the town center and so it’s really easy to do. It’s really inexpensive, and so yeah, the Marble Mountains in Da Nang are really cool.

But as I say, I haven’t been able to broadcast from anywhere because it’s all inside of caves. You know you go in and you climb into this cave and there’s these Buddhist sculptures, and it’s really cool. But as I say I haven’t been able to broadcast from there.

I was going to go to the peak where there’s supposed to be really good views. There might have been reception up there but the ladies at the rest area just said, ‘no, it’s too hot, you shouldn’t do it.’ And I am not a good climber and scrambler anyways, so I sort of trusted them.

There was one other thing I opted out of because it’s behind the Buddha statue. There’s this other really narrow up kind of cave thing and there are stairs but they’re marble. These stairs were so worn down it was almost a sheer climb and I might have been able to make it, but at the time there was absolutely no one else around and if anything happened I was going to be in a little bit of trouble.

So you know, and let me tell you the status of that, I would be wearing a mask because there’s been a little bit of Covid surfacing here, and it always surfaces from the outside, but there is absolutely no one around me, so I’m not wearing a mask. I would not hesitate to put the mask on if someone showed up. I have it right here in my pocket. I’ve been wearing it.

So I was just taking a little rest there. I got here between 7:30 and 8 o’clock this morning and it was already 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28C). Now it’s eleven o’clock, eleven to noon somewhere in there, and it’s even hotter.

So I’m gonna flip the camera and show you some things.

Tourradar

Okay, so we’ve got the tower up there. I don’t think that’s the big fancy pagoda. I think that’s the other tower that is near the elevator. Forgive me, I don’t have my little trusty guidebook on me. It’s in my pocket, but I don’t want to stop to look it up. It’s like the Xa Loi pagoda or tower but, so that’s the wonderful tower there. That’s the one that I think that greets you when you come up the elevator.

And we have Buddha, or one of the Buddhas, as you know there are many Buddhas. We’ve got the lotus leaf, got the chubby Buddha. I will say, I sat down in this courtyard but I haven’t fully explored it yet.

So you can see behind it there is this wonderful structure, all this great color. I mean, let’s get up close. I’m going to start on the end here. We’re just going to run through it. See, look, we’ve got dimensional, I’d say high relief at the very least, almost three-dimensional and we’ve got those wonderful rooftops with the dragons. Those are dragon forms if you can’t tell that.

Up on that second level there are murals. Sometimes the phone gives you a better picture than what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is they’re a little shadowed out right now because of the lighting, but they’re murals telling stories of Buddha’s life.

And of course, more dragons on top.

Let’s see, oh, we’ve got lions here. We got lions, we have got some lion guardians.

I love the dragon columns, if you notice that on the Lady Buddha video I did, the kind of short music video version, I got some focus on the great columns with the dragons on them – a totally different style, entirely different style.

So these are the columns. I’m going to give you a peek inside. I could take my shoes off, but not all temples like it if you take a camera inside, so I’m going to give you a peek. That is obviously a significantly different Buddha than our friend out front. The chubby guy I think is more of a bodhisattva than a Buddha, but often they’re used interchangeably.

So we have the columns. Oh, okay, I need to take off my shoes because I want to show you these guys. Okay, hold on, let me take off my shoes. You know this is a LIVE one, I’m sitting here taking off my shoes in the middle of everything. I’ve just got my socks on.

You know what, I’m gonna do a plug right now for Darn Tough socks. They have been traveling with us for three plus years because I had one pair before that and haven’t had a hole or a problem with them yet.

So Buddhist temples, and actually the Taoist temple in Beijing that we went to, often have these sort of guardian type figures. I’m calling them guardians because I don’t have enough knowledge to call them anything else. So you always have one on that side and one on this side, and yes I’m sort of whispering because this is still a temple, even if no one’s around, it’s still a temple.

There’s no one here. I’m going to sneak in and see if I can do a little filming. I might not talk much.

We’ll see if I get kicked out. This is what’s inside this temple.

I’ve been wandering around the grounds and I’m not quite sure where I am anymore. This is one of the main temples, I think. If you come up the stairs it leads right into this one.

If you notice, there’s a whole bunch of fruit around it for offerings, and a bunch of smaller Buddhas, just not a million of them on this one, but beautiful flowers. Orchids, right those are orchids, right?

Have you ever been in a Buddhist temple? Mention in the comments if you’ve been in a Buddhist temple before, whether you know during your travels or at home. I say this for the, (oh crumbs), you know just to ask because I’m sure I have some Buddhist followers as well, and that’s a silly question.

The drums are really cool. Music here is actually really quite cool.

So, as is often the case, there’s always these gates. I’m gonna walk up close to the gate, gonna have to go down the stairs. These are nice even stairs, very pleasant. I’m still walking them carefully because now I’m just in my socks.

I’m going to put up a link to Darn Tough in our description because I’m now plugging them again, because I don’t even fear about walking on the cement here and having them wear out or anything. They’re going to be fine.

I didn’t wear sandals because I knew there was going to be a lot of hard trekking over all the rough stones, and I was right. I mean the sandals are good. I love my hiking sandals, my Tevas are awesome. But as I say, I’m not very good at it, so I didn’t want to take any chances.

This is a gate, and as I say it’s very common. I’ve passed through a bunch of these gates as I was going through. Let’s see, there’s a gate that direction, one that way too. No surprise, gates on all sides.

You wanna go see what’s out in the front? Let’s go see what’s out in the front.

One thing you’ve got to watch, usually these gates have some sort of threshold step down either going up into them, or on both sides, so okay, oh, now I’m going to wish I had my shoes on.

See, that goes down to Gate Number One. I think this is the long walk out if I don’t go back and take the elevator. We shall see.

Oh, there’s a whole bunch of stuff, there’s things over there, there’s a long walk down, there are stairs up to a statue up there.

You can tell it’s just a really nice, peaceful setting. So, yeah, you come up the stairs and you’re greeted by this.

So this is Marble Mountains. This is a small sample. I will be making a longer video because as I said, I couldn’t broadcast. And you didn’t want to see all the stuff in between, all the things, me scrambling over rocks and tha, trying to hold on to a camera would not be a good thing.

So this is a little sampling of the Marble Mountains. I hope you’re enjoying it. I hope you like these little LIVE peeks that I give. As I say the next video will be a much longer, not longer necessarily, but it’ll cover more things that I can actually show you, that I recorded.

I’m just going to say a simple thanks for joining me. I really appreciate you showing up and being here. I like to talk to you face to face when I do this.

So yeah, thanks for joining me, thanks for being here. If you didn’t catch it at the beginning, this is the Marble Mountains in Da Nang, Vietnam. We do have a few more months here, fortunately, and we’re doing good. So I just wanted to share this with you.

See you next time.

Trina Phillips

I've been traveling to off-the-beaten-path destinations for more than 20 years. Now I'm sharing my continuing adventures in Africa.

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