Advertisement
Published: February 21st 2009
Edit Blog Post
P1000980
A night market along the river. So this is the first time that I've ever seen or ridden on a sleeper bus. The bus actually had beds fully equipped with a pillow and blanket along with functioning air conditioning and a window that opened. I'm not an engineer but I did find three major flaws with the sleeper buses construction that I'd like to take a moment to point out. One, when I was laying on my side the screenless window was at eye level and opened about a foot and a half. I had to shut the window because I almost lost my pillow on the freeway. Two, the seats were made out of pleather and were not completely horizontal, they were angled up so that my head was always higher than my feet. When the bus driver would slam on the breaks every half hour to avoid a head on collision because he was trying to pass another bus on a switchback I would slide forward and my feet would hit the seat in front of me. And lastly, three, the bus came with a freakin cruise ship horn so every time he felt the unnecessary need to lay on it, everyone on the bus
P1000990
A river view with skylights for the god awful band in the far background. woke up! Other than that the bus ride was smooth sailing.
Upon arrival to Hoi An we grabbed lunch and found a guesthouse right on the river. Hoi An is funny because it's a beach town but you have to take a motorbike to the beach because it's too far to walk yet we were staying on a huge river. I guess I've never seen a river that close to the beach. We walked around and did some shopping because you can get knock off Lacoste and Polo shirts for $3 each, so as you can imagine there is a box full of those on it's way to Michigan. Kailie had some custom made boots that I think were Rainbow Brights leftovers, but they were only $30. That night we headed out to grab some dinner, we had a recommendation so we went there. The food was awesome, Kailie and I split and meal for two and I think it was like a 8 course meal for a total of about $8. Pretty good deal if you ask me! We noticed some skylights and music in the distance so we headed over to see what was going on. On the
P1000999
Taking the motorbike to the beach. walk along the river there were numerous little boxes that looked like Chinese takeout containers floating down the river with candles lit inside of them. It's to the point that I don't even ask what the celebration is because everywhere I've gone there had been some reason to celebrate something. There were about 15 brightly lit, colorful animals on pedestals in the water as well. It was a very nice walk into town. We asked around to find out what it cost to get in and were surprised to find out that it was free. Upon arrival we found out why. First off, it was heavy metal music and if you could see this town you could see how out of place they were. Second, this band was awful, the lead singer was butchering lyrics to popular songs and literally sounded as if he was coming down off heroin while being beaten. People were pouring out of the gates to get away from the noise. So, we headed back to the guesthouse and passed out.
The next morning we headed to the beach via motorbike. There were 3 of us on separate bikes holding on all the way to the
P1010011
No hands! beach. The ride was pretty uneventful for Vietnamese standards but it was beautiful. We passed a huge rice field and some bungalows over the water before arriving to the beach. We were dropped off at a restaurant and they said if we ate there sometime in the day they would provide us with free beach chairs so we agreed. The beached are covered with ladies and children all selling the same things. They approach you on average every 5 minutes, that doesn't sound bad until you're there for 5 hours. The thing that gets me is that very few of the products they sell are useful at the beach. I won't list all the things but the most useless product I came across had to be the bag of peppercorns. What tourist is going to want that and even if they did, what would you do with it at the beach? I feel that if these people were selling beach towels, sunscreen, aloe, etc. they would make a few more sales. We grabbed lunch as agreed at the beach restaurant. They had fresh seafood and it was reasonably priced! We got to have a little meet and greet with the
P1010016
The beach. crabs before they cooked them for us. I picked out a large one in the corner of the tank, I thought I saw him shoot me a look and that was the deciding factor. Along with the crabs were Tiger Prawns and steamed rice. The table was an absolute disaster upon completion of the meal, it looked like a graveyard. The lunch was great and if I had another day I would have gone back.
From the beach we headed back to the guesthouse and showered up because we had a cab to catch to the airport. Hoi An was an awesome city and I wish we had budgeted more time for it but our flight was already booked down to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) for the following day so we were stuck. Next stop Saigon!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.119s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0933s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb