From Hue, we went to Hoi An, which was about a five-hour bus ride away. We were in Hoi An for three days, but I may have only this entry to memorialize it because it wasn’t that exciting. I had a good time, mind you, but there’s not that much to write about. Anyway, that should help catch up the blog.
Hoi An is an ancient port city that thrived as the center of the Silk Road hundreds of years ago, but disappeared from maps and everywhere else until the past twenty years, when it was revived for tourism. At this point, I’d have to say that it is now one of the biggest tourist traps that I’ve ever seen. One of them. Don’t worry, Vegas, you still have the title.
The big thing to do in Hoi An is shop. There are tons of places to go to get custom made suits, dresses, shoes, rings and various other items that you may want to have made. These items aren’t necessarily cheap, but they are extremely inexpensive when compared to Western standards. The problem, for me, is that I’m not really a shopper. I’m a non-practicing lawyer. I have eight suits and no job. The last thing I need right now is another suit.
That is not to say that I didn’t buy anything in Hoi An. The stuff is so inexpensive, that I couldn’t help but buy some stuff. I got a couple pairs of shorts, some touristy t-shirts, some sandals, a sleeping bag and some souvenirs. As an example, the touristy t-shirts were $2 each, and could be bargained down to a quarter of that if you had the time or the interest in doing so.
There is also what is probably a nice beach in Hoi An. From our hotel, the beach is a 4 km walk, so I went down to check it out. It wasn’t bad – sandy instead of rocky and the water was nice. The problem, however, was that I happen to be in southern Vietnam during the wet season and the wet season in southern Vietnam is pretty freaking wet. It rained the entire time we were in Hoi An, so at the beach, I mainly just walked around and imagined how beautiful it might be in beautiful weather.
The food in Hoi An was fair to good, depending on where we went. Like other tourist cities, all of the restaurants offer “authentic” local foods as well as pizza, hamburgers and anything else that the restaurants think will bring in Western customers. I did have a delicious sautéed noodles dish at Café 96, though. That and a Vietnamese iced tea cost me 53,000 Vietnamese dong – or less than three dollars American. If you’re in town, I recommend it.
In addition, several of us participated in a cooking class. It wasn’t nearly as fun or interesting as the cooking class I took in Yangshuo because we weren’t actually cooking our individual dishes. We learned some recipes and ate what we “cooked” – though that basically meant we ate what we chopped and somebody else cooked. All the “cooking” we did was turning some spring rolls in a frying pan. It was fun enough, I guess, and I did think seeing the geckos crawling around the wall of the class was pretty cool.
The hotel that we stayed in was nice enough, with free wifi. It had a buffet breakfast which was passable, especially at $1.50 for all-you-can-eat. There was a café a few doors down with coffee and beer and across the street from that is a karaoke bar, where we were able to drink some Tiger beer and belt out some English-language songs.
Like I said in the beginning, Hoi An is a nice town and I certainly had a good time. There’s just not a lot worth writing about it other than about the markets, the beach and the restaurants and not a lot more about those than I’ve already said. In several hours, I will be in Nha Trang, which is another touristy beach area, so we’ll see if that is much different than Ha Noi. Don’t worry; I’ll let you know.
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