On Friday night I had the worst sleep ever!! Just after I turned the light out to go to sleep I heard the strangest rustling sound so I jumped up to see what it was. As soon as I turned the light on I noticed that something was amiss - the bakery bag with my breakfast for the morning that I had put on the desk had moved about 3 feet to behind the TV! That is when I saw the mouse! For some illogical reason mice really creep me out, and I stood still for ages trying to work out what to do. After a while I think the mouse knew that I was aware of its presence and it scuttled off somewhere, so I took the opportunity to throw the bag out of the window onto the balcony hoping that it would leave the room. I put the TV on low when I went to sleep as I thought the noise and light would keep the mouse away, but I woke up to a scratching noise in the middle of the night. This time the mouse was in the bin so I sat watching it for a while, and when it made a run at me I hissed and it backed away. I'd really had enough by this stage so I moved the bin outside the door and this time it stayed away (to my knowledge) until I woke up at 6am to get ready for the bus.

The bus to Quang Ngai was really cool, it was a sleeper bus, despite the fact that the journey was made in the day time, and everyone had their own little bed/seat thing. It was actually really comfortable and the seats reclined a long way so I was able to catch up on my sleep for a few hours. After 9 hours on the bus I was dropped off in Quang Ngai on the roadside as everyone else on the bus was travelling on to Hoi An. Luckily there were motos there so I was driven into the centre and with some difficulty eventually found a guesthouse. Nobody here speaks English, and it is obviously not a stop on the tourist map as I have not seen another Western person since I've been here. This means that I have been stared at a lot, something I am really not used to and I'm not quite sure I like it. As a result of it not being a tourist place it means that I have been able to try traditional Vietnamese food, and I did manage to find a restaurant where the menus were in English. Later in the evening I enquired at my guesthouse about hiring a moto and a driver for the following day and the owners understood so little of what I said that they got a kid from next door to come translate!!

There is only one attraction here and that is the Son My memorial site. As it was the only thing I planned to visit I allowed myself a lie in as I have been getting up ridiculously early for the past couple of weeks. I had a late breakfast and decided to enquire about a bus to Hoi An before I went to the memorial site. This is where I encountered a major problem - there are no buses out of Quang Ngai. This caused me to panic for a little while as I genuinely thought I was going to be stuck in this non-English speaking town, but I managed to find an alternative. I've had to change my travel plans a bit and am going to Danang by train, and from there I'll have to back-track on myself to go to Hoi An. It's not ideal but at least I can leave!

I hired a moto and driver just after lunch time to take me the 15km to the Son My site. Straight inside the entrance there is a big statue dedicated to the villagers massacred at the site, and then around it are reconstructions of the villagers. On the 16th March 1968 American troops entered the village early in the morning and killed 504 villagers, among them children, elderly and pregnant women. The reconstructions show how houses looked, but mostly there are just the foundations of houses and artillary bunkers remaining. The path has been made of a dirty concrete and there are imprints of boots and bare feet to represent the chaos that would have been caused by the soldiers and villagers. There is also a museum on the site which was really informative. The first thing you see as you walk into the building is a large plaque listing all the villagers names and ages, and then there is an old guestbook where you can read comments from visitors dating back 30 years. There were a lot of entries from Americans, both war veterans and later generations, and most of them express their shame and regret. Not all Americans are hung out to dry however, and there is a section devoted to Pilot Hugh Thompson who stopped civilians being murdered by Lieutenant Calley, leader of the massacre. Unfortunately it seems that Leiutenant Calley was pardoned of his war crimes while Hugh Thompson was the subject of much abuse from fellow Americans and was court marshalled for his actions. As you walk around the museum there are various displays and photographs of soldiers burning villagers houses and holding guns to their heads. The only US casuality from this raid was of a soldier who shot himself in the foot in order to get himself out of his "duties" and there is photographic evidence of this. At the end of the exhibit there were photographs showing how the survivors and their descendants have moved on with their lives as well as photos of US war veterans visiting the memorial. Once I had been around the museum I walked to a couple of mass burial sites and then returned to the town by moto.