Cloudy, warm and close. The bus out of Chan May shares the road with water buffalo, scooters carrying entire families, and lorries that overtake on faith.

Part of the run goes through the Hai Van Tunnel, nearly four miles of it, opened in 2005. Before the tunnel the road went over the Hai Van Pass instead, which is spectacular and adds an hour.

My Son sits in a valley ringed by hills, and it is far older than we had expected. The Cham kings were building here from the 4th century and carried on for the best part of nine hundred years. What is left is brick towers in groups across the valley floor, carved and weathered. A great deal of it was destroyed by American bombing in 1969, and the guides do not soften that.

Da Nang is going up fast, though a fair number of the towers were standing half-finished — Covid, or money, or both. Lunch was at Hue Xua Cafe and it was one of the better meals of the trip: chicken and corn soup, crisp spring rolls, fried soy noodles with seafood, cheese-baked chicken, cabbage in a shiitake sauce, and fried rice.

Our guide spent a good part of the drive talking about land. All of it in Vietnam belongs to the state, but households can now hold long-term use rights and buy and sell them, which is a very large change in a very short time. A city plot runs about five metres by twenty. Out in the country you get rather more.

Linh Ung Pagoda is up on the Son Tra peninsula, with a 67-metre Lady Buddha standing over it — one of the tallest in Vietnam. She has her back to the city and her eyes on the water, which is rather the point of her.

We finished with a drive along Non Nuoc Beach — China Beach, to the Americans who came here on leave during the war. It is white sand and hotels now. The day we saw it a low sitting off the coast had the water churning and nobody was in it.