Cham Sculpture Museum — the kindest place to take shelter from the rain in Da Nang

It rains in Da Nang from around September to December, and some days it rains all day without stopping. On days like that, the Museum of Cham Sculpture is worth visiting — it's right at the foot of Dragon Bridge, at the corner of Trung Nu Vuong and Bach Dang streets, and you can walk there from the city center.

The museum holds the world's largest collection of Cham sculptures, most of them sandstone, gathered from Cham towers in Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, and Binh Dinh. Many of the artifacts date from the 7th to the 15th century.

The most striking things for first-time visitors are the animal statues: Gajasimha (a body of a lion with the head of an elephant), the divine serpent Naga, and the sacred bull Nandin. Next come the altars densely carved with intricate patterns and the statue of the Tra Kieu dancer.

A few things to note:

• The entrance ticket costs only a few tens of thousands of dong, which is cheap compared to the general price level of tourist attractions here. There's automatic audio guide via QR code right at each artifact — you should use it, because otherwise all the sandstone statues tend to look pretty much alike. The space isn't large, so going through it thoroughly takes about 1–1.5 hours to finish. The light is mainly natural light coming through the window, so it's easier to take photos in the morning than in the late afternoon.

This is also a good place to understand why this area has so many Cham towers — before it became Da Nang, the whole region used to be a center of the Champa Kingdom.