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Central Vietnam's dominant port and its fourth largest city, Da Nang harbours few sights beyond the exceptional Cham Museum, but is an unexpectedly amiable place and a major transport hub with air connections as well as road and rail links. In the American War it served as a massive South Vietnamese airbase and played host to thousands of US troops as well as refugees searching for work. But walking around today, it's the earlier, French presence which is more apparent in the leafy boulevards and colonial-style houses.

Two blocks south of Cho Han market, past the soft, salmon-mousse cathedral, colonial Da Nang is represented by a few wooden and stucco houses at the eastern end of Tran Quoc Toan. From here turn right along the river for 750m to reach the Cham Museum , at the south end of Bach Dang (daily 7am-5pm; $2), the most comprehensive display of Cham art in the world. Its display of graceful, sometimes severe, terracotta and sandstone figures gives a tantalizing glimpse of an artistically inspired culture that ruled most of southern Vietnam for a thousand years. Exhibits are grouped according to their place of origin: My Son (4-11C), Tra Kieu (Simhapura; 4-10C), Dong Duong (Indrapura; 8-10C), and Binh Dinh (11-15C).

Da Nang's Cao Dai Temple , at 63 Hai Phong opposite the hospital, was built in 1956 and is Vietnam's second most important after Tay Ninh . An elderly archbishop, assisted by seventeen priests, ministers to a congregation here said to number 50,000. The temple is a smaller, simpler version of Tay Ninh, dominated inside by the all-seeing eye of the Supreme Being and paintings of Cao Dai's principal saints, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Jesus Christ and Buddha. Adherents gather to worship four times a day (6am, noon, 6pm, midnight).