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Published: September 29th 2007
Hi Friends and Family,
Breakfast was a wonderful buffet of noodles, French bread, toast, fried or scrambled eggs, local delicacies, 100 day old eggs, rice and various stews and sauces, salted herring in tomato sauce, a variety of pates and jams, melon, banana, dragon fruit which is a black and white dotted fruit on the inside and a bright purple on the outside, pineapple and lots of yummy cake. Tea / coffee, orange, lemon, strawberry and pinapple juices.
We went back and forth a few times!
Today was a long but scenic drive to Hoi An. We sat on the front seat of the bus this time, so we could experience the drive more fully!
Today was enormously humid and all day I felt hot, bothered and in a faint. Even getting out of our bus for a toilet-stop was proving a bit of an effort as all I wanted to do was either sit down, or sleep or have a cold drink to cool down!
We stopped at My Son which is a World Heritage Site in Hoi An, and where war atrocities were committed whereby an innocent village and its people were completely and
utterly destroyed. It made me think how some human beings are able to forgive in order to move on in life and hopefully, the criminals concerned are, or were punished.
Today, I was able to get a closer look at the "swans" and how pretty they all look as we came into the township of Hoi An. We dropped our stuff at the "Hai Yen" Hotel or in English, the Sea Swallow.
It's a medium sized hotel and on the outside oozed old glamour, but on the inside was falling apart!
Our wardrobe door was broken, we had a filthy drinking glass in our bathroom and no glasses anywhere else. The shower curtain was a health hazard and the shower head itself was propped up by a stuffed plastic bag. In some rooms the pipes spurted either cold water only, hot water only, or no water at all! However, its all part of the experience and we accept that. Besides, they
DO have a fantastic pool. We met up the others at 19:00 so that we could do a walking tour of the area in order to get our bearings.
I mentioned the Moon Festival the
other day, and today was the Grand Finale. The town was heaving with dragons and drummers and parades and spectators. It was great to see and I felt privileged to be there. We were lucky (later) to be in the bar which was right over the ceremony so we could see how the people would stand on the highest platform and the dragon would jump, leap and climb, in order to get to the person so that the dragon could "feed" ie. collect gifts.
At some point, they also tried to kidnap girlfriends and wives of the audience but I wasn't quite sure why this was so. Maybe to get a "ransom" or maybe it was just for fun, until they began to get a little rough, and the girls had to hide.
Hoi An seems to be predominantly Chinese, as we saw lots of old Chinese trading shops and houses and most places had Chinese symbols all the buildings. Consequently, our Intrepid group had a buffet at a Chinese restaurant. We had trays of rice, fried wontons covered with mushrooms, tomatoes and spring onions filled with fish or meat. We then had trays of grilled fish covered
Hoi An
The Dragonswith lemon and crunchy things on top, some other type of fish and some sort of steamed pudding thing called a "white rose" which you dip into chilli fish sauce, which was all washed down with bottles of local Hoi An beer. Dessert was trays of fruit.
After dinner, we continued our walkabout and while some people went to the bakery for cake and coffee, we went to a restaurant / bar called "Tam-Tam" where I had a Big Bamboo cocktail and my companion had 2 Mojitos ($8) . We were in the bar with Bill, the two Vietnamese group leaders and Trevor, and somewhere along the way, my companion (innocently I presume), picked up a lone Australian girl to join our table. I was livid with anger. I did
NOT want a pretty, young girl upsetting the dynamics.
I'M the young, pretty girl here thank you very much!
Although I was polite (through the skin of my teeth I might add), this girl got the message and within a couple of minutes left the table. By this time, it was raining cats and dogs
AND there was a power failure again, so she must have been staying nearby! After about 30 minutes, we too decided to take our leave as we didn't want to get stuck at the bar all night. At least, I didn't!
We walked in the dark and through a few puddles in the rain but finally made it back to the hotel.
Tomorrow. Shopping. Hurrah!
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