Hoi An is an ancient city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We've been to five cities in Vietnam so far, and each has been unique and distinctive from the others. This one has the charm of very old architecture, a mixture of Cham, Viet, Japanese and especially Chinese. Although the Vietnamese don't like to acknowledge their Chinese genes and heritage, the Chinese controlled the land for a thousand years, especially in the coastal trading cities.
We didn't get the bus we'd asked for - we learned later that the bus we'd requested doesn't stop here, but the agent hadn't explained that. The bus we got was comfortable. We had a sleeper bus with 40 berths between only five passengers, two from Argentina. The seats were like recliners for astronauts, and I found mine quite comfortable, with good back support, leg room and a pillow that worked when you supplemented it with a blanket or hoodie.
However, the pick-up guy was surly as hell, just like the FUTA bus pick-up guy. And at the other end, unlike the FUTA bus, there was no delivery to our final destination - they just dumped us out on the street in front of the worst bait-and-switch hotel I've experienced, and pretended there was no bus station beyond, which there was. It was a kick-back situation, I suspect.
The hotel was a nice bit of older architecture from the outside, but the owner and staff were grumpy and miserable, and out of 154 reviews on Tripadvisor - we didn't think to look this up until we'd already had a problem with the owner - there were 19 "poor" and 103 "terrible"! After the owner lied about the prices and what came with the room, he also tried to shake us down for an extra $2 before he'd switch on the air conditioning, lied about the restaurant across the street that he'd said was connected with the hotel and would give us a 20% discount, and lied about having working wifi. We added our "terrible" rating to the list of reviews on Tripadvisor. I saw evidence of the window being jimmied, which made me afraid to sleep there. If you visit Hoi An, avoid the Thien Trung hotel like the plague! We decided that first thing the following morning we would head to another nearby hotel where we would happily paid a few dollars more for a nicer room and more congenial staff.
The town of Hoi An is a treat, however. We breakfasted at the Cargo Club overlooking the river, and then visited a "museum of history and culture" and one of the oldest trading houses in the old town. We walked through the market and took photos of some of the buildings. The next day we rented two bicycles and had seafood at a restaurant near the beach, watched a musical performance at an "art craft manufacturing workshop".
One thing that began to become aggravating to me was the pestering of hawkers who won't take several loud "No, thanks!" in a row for a rejection of their offerings. Bits had told us he wants to make a T-shirt that has the letters "ATM" inside a circle with a line through it. We walked past a dozen boats that wanted to take us for a ride on the river and each one pestered us even though they had to have observed that we'd already turned down all the previous touts. They walk right into restaurants to try to sell us junk at our tables - always the same junk, over and over again. The restaurant staff, who stand at the front with menus and call out to tourists walking by, don't do anything to stop them. We hoped that on bicycles they wouldn't get a chance to harass us.
Jan 3rd. We left the Thien Trung hotel quite early and walked a block to the Nguyen Phu'o'ng hotel, where we got a much nicer and quieter room with a lovely friendly desk clerk for only a few dollars more. We had Mi Quang for breakfast - a typical Vietnamese breakfast but a local Hoi An specialty, with egg noodles, veggies, shrimp, pork peanuts and a tomato base. Other local specialties include Cao Lau, another pork and noodle dish which is almost as good, and "white roses", a white rice noodle dumpling appetizer with a piece of pork inside. The Mi Quang is served in a restaurant right next door to our new hotel, and was delicious. We enjoyed the other two dishes last night for supper, along with several glasses of draft beer at - get this! - 15 cents/glass. Reminded me of Alberta bars forty years ago where I used to order draft for a quarter, and that was cheaper than coke in those days.
We rented two bikes for $1/day each (literally a 24 hr day) and rode to the morning cultural show of musicians and dance, then returned to the hotel to organize laundry and research hotels in Hue during the heat of the day. We got the desk clerk to help us book a hotel, then rode to the beach, a few kilometres away. We had seafood noodles and seafood fried rice, and iced coffee in a small restaurant just off the beach. Vietnamese mocha coffee is delicious.
We constructed our evening meal of various "street food" items - riding along on our bicycles, looking for good photos, we simply stopped wherever there were good rice cakes on a brazier, or corn on the cob, or whatever took our fancy. We were hoping to attend a local Couchsurfing "meet-up" which is supposed to happen every Friday, here. We had trouble getting answers to emails here, for some odd reason, so I wasn't able to get confirmation that the meet up was on, but we had the bikes anyway, so we went on speculation. Luckily it was happening. We met lots of interesting CS'ers and had a very pleasant social evening.
The next morning we followed up on an invitation from Troy to visit him where he is staying at a coffeeshop owned by Huan. Troy is a good cook from New York, a Vietnamese who left at the age of 15, and is back now visiting family and exploring the idea of expanding Huan's coffeeshop menu. After a long chat, we went for lunch at a justly famous local Indian restaurant with delicious food. Then Deb and I visited two more ancient homes, and drove across bridges to parts of Hoi An that are a little newer but still quite interesting. There's a second tourist strip on the opposite side of the river that gets pretty bright and noisy in the evenings. It's where a lot of the residents go to party.
In the evening we attended yet another performance of traditional song and dance, and then strolled around the downtown area. We enjoyed a game of Vietnamese bingo - fun, rather like our bingo game but with several exotic twists including two singers who sang an endless number of verses of songs as the bingo words and symbols (not numbers) were pulled from a lucky red can. Deb played, but didn't win.
In the evening we attended yet another performance of traditional song and dance, and then strolled around the downtown area. We enjoyed a game of Vietnamese bingo - fun, rather like our bingo game but with several exotic twists including two singers who sang an endless number of verses of songs as the bingo words and symbols (not numbers) were pulled from a lucky red can. Deb played, but didn't win.
We watched another "folk game of breaking pots" which is rather like the Spanish pinata game. We watched a piano player and some kids singing, had another delicious cheap supper, and checked out an expensive bar where they had advertised a nightly "jam", but it turned out to be only the singers who took turns on stage - rather like karaoke with live music. It was expensive...I'd had a couple of 20 cent beers for supper, but they wanted about $3.50 for a beer! That makes little sense to me considering what Vietnamese can afford to pay; maybe there is a separate menu for tourists. Wouldn't be the first place I've seen that happen.
Still, we enjoyed our day. Hoi An absolutely oozes charm, at night as well as in the day, and it is a tiny place. I was correct in guessing that the bicycles would insulate us from the touts, so we rode around on them for two days, and enjoyed the speed and freedom. Deborah wanted to title this blog posting "Better than Bixi" - Bixi is the company whose bicycles she rented during the Tall Ships Festival last summer. Hoi An is pretty flat so it was never difficult to pedal, but I did turn left and swerve in front of a motorcycle once, causing him to brake so fiercely that he skid, almost teaching me a hard lesson.
We heard about a hotel owner who might have liked to give us a room in return for providing English and hospitality training for his staff. This was Allister's idea. He's the local CS ambassador who organized last night's meeting. But we'd have to get back to the hotel to check out by noon, and the pick-up van for the bus company was scheduled to pick us up at 1 p.m. to take us to Hue, our last scheduled stop before Hanoi. We were going to miss Da Nang, but we expected to visit it on the way back south.
Jan 4th: we spent the morning enjoying breakfast at Cafe 57 on Ba Trieu. It had cheap prices, a good cook, and his friendly funny daughter was our waitress. There was a mynah bird at one corner of the dining room who talked to her and to the guests, and mimics the beautiful songs of other nearby birds in cages. I got my photos ordered and captioned while we sat in the cafe and in the lobby of our hotel waiting to be picked up and taken to the bus for our four hour ride to Hue.
Still, we enjoyed our day. Hoi An absolutely oozes charm, at night as well as in the day, and it is a tiny place. I was correct in guessing that the bicycles would insulate us from the touts, so we rode around on them for two days, and enjoyed the speed and freedom. Deborah wanted to title this blog posting "Better than Bixi" - Bixi is the company whose bicycles she rented during the Tall Ships Festival last summer. Hoi An is pretty flat so it was never difficult to pedal, but I did turn left and swerve in front of a motorcycle once, causing him to brake so fiercely that he skid, almost teaching me a hard lesson.
We heard about a hotel owner who might have liked to give us a room in return for providing English and hospitality training for his staff. This was Allister's idea. He's the local CS ambassador who organized last night's meeting. But we'd have to get back to the hotel to check out by noon, and the pick-up van for the bus company was scheduled to pick us up at 1 p.m. to take us to Hue, our last scheduled stop before Hanoi. We were going to miss Da Nang, but we expected to visit it on the way back south.
Jan 4th: we spent the morning enjoying breakfast at Cafe 57 on Ba Trieu. It had cheap prices, a good cook, and his friendly funny daughter was our waitress. There was a mynah bird at one corner of the dining room who talked to her and to the guests, and mimics the beautiful songs of other nearby birds in cages. I got my photos ordered and captioned while we sat in the cafe and in the lobby of our hotel waiting to be picked up and taken to the bus for our four hour ride to Hue.
Next entry: Citadel City
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