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Published: August 15th 2009
After our comfortable and uneventful journey from Saigon to Nha Trang on the open tour sleeper bus we thought that all future journeys on it would be that pleasant. We were wrong. First off we didn't manage to get the long beds at the back so were cramped onto the beds in the middle that were only about 4ft long. Amy's was slightly better because it was a window bed which meant that she had something to lean on to stop her falling out (we were on the top level) but I had the middle bunk which meant I had nothing to cling onto as the driver hurled the bus around the twisty coastal roads throughout the night. I just about got a couple of hour’s sleep during which I dreamt I was trying to sleep on the top of a bendy flagpole in a gale. Which is oddly, exactly how I felt when I was awake too. Then, at around 2am (with 6 hours still to go) the driver stopped in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of drunken Vietnamese guys got on. This was clearly not a scheduled stop as the buses are laid on for tourists and
therefore only stop and drop off at the tourist hot spots and not random bends in the road that are a million miles from anywhere. It seemed that the driver had decided to make a bit extra on top of his regular salary and was picking his mates up on the way through for a few thousand dong each. Who says free enterprise has no place in a communist economy? We wouldn't have minded too much but all of the beds were already taken so all nine (yes, nine!) of them had to sleep on the floor between the beds meaning that we had to tread over them in the already narrow aisles when going to the toilet or toppling off our bunks. On top of that, the one who decided to sleep below me and Amy first drunkenly demanded that Amy give him her pillow before we told him to bugger off and then tried to take a leak in a corner of the bus when everybody was asleep about an hour later. If we weren't getting much sleep before he got on we certainly weren't going to get any afterwards. Oh, and the whole journey was soundtracked by
some loud and rubbish Asian pop that the driver refused to turn off or down. Joy. The only redeeming factor was that we met a lovely couple from north London called Hugo and Jess who we chatted to and laughed about the journey with.
We finally arrived in Hoi An at around 8am and were dropped at a hotel near the centre of town. Of course, nepotism and corruption are alive and well in SE Asia so we were encouraged to stay at this hotel by our driver because "all other hotels in Hoi An are no good" and "this is good hotel". Nothing to do with the fact that they paid him a commission to bring people there of course. We agreed to view a room with customary suspicion before realising that the hotel was actually pretty nice, with a small pool, restaurant and nice clean rooms for only 15 US dollars a night. We relaxed and signed in thinking that not all dodgy commission deals are rip offs. More on that topic later...
After a few hours sleep (during which I felt weird when my bed didn't threaten to tip me out every few minutes and
I couldn't hear sanity-threatening Asian pop) we woke up and went to explore our new home. Hoi An is famous for a few reasons. The main draw for travelers is that the small town is a hot spot for low cost, high quality tailors. Unfortunately, over the years many people have cottoned on (excuse the pun) to this fact and many even lower cost but also low quality tailors have opened up to cash in on the clothing boom. Sorting the original and good tailors from the new ones with no actual tailoring experience seemed like a fun task and one that we would dedicate our first day to. Hoi An is also famous as a UNESCO World Heritage site, a title it earned in 1999 as a well preserved example of a 15th to 19th century Asian trading port. The buildings and general look of the town have remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years and take influences from both local and foreign styles. There are old French style shop fronts with shuttered windows, Chinese lanterns hanging every house, a Japanese built bridge and windy narrow lanes that feel like rural Spain. As we wandered the surprisingly quiet streets
(cars have been banned from Hoi An during the day to preserve the peaceful setting) we dropped into around 10 tailors to check prices and fabrics and see if we could judge whether they would actually be any good. We had a few recommendations from travelers we had met along the way and also had a good idea of some decent places, as well as a couple to avoid, from searching the internet. We had also had a book of testimonials pressed upon us when we'd arrived in our hotel that morning that seemed to suspiciously lavish praise on one tailor and one tailor only while ferociously damning the rest. We even poked our noses into a couple that we knew nothing about, just to see what we thought of them.
After pounding the streets assessing tailors for a couple of hours we settled down in a nice little restaurant for some lunch. Food is another reason that Hoi An has become famous and it is home to a couple of dishes that you can only get within the town itself. White Roses are very fine and delicate shrimp dumplings that are bunched up to look like roses and
Cao Lầu is a noodle dish that contains roast pork, fried wonton (the Asian version of croutons), various herbs and vegetables covered with a lovely thick sweet sauce. The reason that you can only get Cao Lầu in Hoi An is that, to make the dish correctly, you have to use water from a specific well in the town. We ordered both and chilled out with a couple of Beer Saigons while we watched the town go by. Lunch was excellent and Cao Lầu quickly went to the top of our favourite Asian meals list. Yes, we do have one. And yes, I know we're obsessed with food.
That evening we debated our tailor choices and decided that, for our suits and smart shirts we would go with Bi Bo. We had seen some positive reviews online and really liked the lady when we went in to chat with her. There was no sales patter and no pressure and we even saw one of her assistants working on some clothes that looked excellent quality. For some casual shirts, jeans and a dress for Amy we decided on an unknown tailors called Son Ha who were suspiciously cheap but had
the best range of fabrics that we'd seen. The next day we visited them both, chose the styles and materials that we wanted and then let the experts (or not, as the case might be), get on with their work. The lady in Bi Bo also recommended a cobblers called 09 Shoes who could make completely custom shoes so we paid them a visit too. When we went in they had a pile of fashion magazines and mail order catalogues that we could leaf through, choose which highly expensive shoes we wanted them to replicate and even pick the leather or fabric that we wanted. There was a lady getting her favourite Jimmy Choos copied for about 30 US dollars when we were there! Amy decided on a pair of brightly coloured trainers and a pair of smart shoes to match the dress she was having made and I went for a pair of casual trainers. We did however, neglect to use the tailor that our hotel recommended, although we did go in and chat to them. They were called Peace (I really don't need my tailors to make a political statement about me. It's a tailors, not a bloody
lifestyle choice) and seemed to be fairly professional but we got on really well with the lady in Bi Bo so chose her instead. This was to have ramifications further down the line...
The next couple of days we just chilled out in the town, met up with Hugo and Jess a couple of times and ate in lots of the lovely Hoi An restaurants. Since leaving the north we have found the food in Vietnam to be incredible and generally on a par with Thailand, although I do miss the spiciness of the Thai curries and salads. We went back into Bi Bo a couple of times for refittings and the girls in there were brilliant, spotting small adjustments that were needed before we did. They were incredibly helpful and really understood the concept of customer service and satisfaction, something that few places in SE Asia do. The clothes came out fantastic and we were so pleased with them that we asked the ladies to keep our measurements somewhere so that we can order more stuff when we get back to the UK. The ladies in Son Ha were less helpful and couldn't go more than a minute
or so without trying to sell us some more stuff but the clothes came out well in the end, although it did require a little persistence on our part when trying to persuade them that alterations were required. The shoes from 09 Shoes were flawless and didn't even require adjustments. They had painstakingly measured our feet on our first visit and made the shoes to fit perfectly. They were also incredibly comfortable! All in all we were really happy with our purchases and didn't even mind jumping through hoops at the local post office to send them home.
The one downside of Hoi An was getting kicked out of our hotel. One morning we came down and were told we had to get out the next morning because a large group was coming in who would need the whole hotel. Fair enough we thought, nobody in their right mind would turn down such a lucrative booking but telling us when we checked in would have been nice. Undaunted we trekked around some of the local hotels trying to find somewhere cheap and after a couple of hours settled on a slightly run down but adequate place a little further
out of town. We were a little annoyed but let it go. The next morning when we were checking out we thought that the reception area would be manic with all of the new arrivals and any existing guests checking out but it was just as quiet as usual which aroused our suspicions. It was only when we mentioned it to the lady in Bi Bo while we were picking up our clothes that she filled us in on the real reason we were being kicked out. Apparently our hotel (Hoa Binh Hotel - don't use them if you go to Hoi An) takes commission from all the people it sends to Peace tailors and if the guests don't get any clothes made there in the first couple of days of their stay the hotel kicks them out so they can get more people in the door and send them to Peace instead. We chose Bi Bo so, despite paying 15 US dollars a night, we weren't getting them and extra money from Peace so they'd rather take a new bunch of guests from that day's open tour bus and get rid of us. Nice.
Yet another reason that
Hoi An has become famous is for the lunar festival that is held every month at full moon. The party is somewhat different from the full moon madness in Thailand and involves the authorities cutting the power at nightfall and the whole town becoming lit with candles. This would make any town look attractive but in Hoi An with its small rustic looking alleyways, old buildings and river it looked simply incredible. Everybody in town comes out onto the streets and burns offerings on the roadside, either in metal bins or just on the pavement. Children sell you little candles in paper boxes and you are supposed to buy one and then place it on the slow moving river and let it drift downstream to bring you luck. The full moon fell on the 4th August so that evening we got ready (in the dark in our hotel room!) and then headed out into town to wander through the candlelit streets, soak up the atmosphere and watch locals perform music with their families in shop doorways or sell souvenirs on the street. We walked down to the river and got a seat at a restaurant overlooking the water where we
watched a traditional music show which, in SE Asian style, was at full volume and precluded any nice dinner conversation. The food wasn't great but the view more than made up for it and seeing hundreds of small candles drifting down the river in the dark was beautiful. After dinner we bought a candle each and walked across a small rickety bridge to the middle of the water before setting our lights down and watching them drift off into the mass of small flames further downstream. There were a few boats at the water's edge offering us a trip downstream in an old wooden row boat for 40,000 dong (about 1 pound 30) which we couldn't really refuse. Just as we were about to get in we saw Hugo and Jess again so we took a boat per couple and drifted down the river enjoying the spectacular scenery with them. When we got back on land they went for dinner and we went to meet David and Matt from the RealGap program who had told us they were in town. We had a few beers and caught up on what we'd all been doing before Hugo and Jess joined us
later on.
On our final day in Hoi An we went to the famous China Beach about 30km away. We arrived at around 10.30am to a virtually deserted stretch of pristine white sand the was as soft as flour and as hot as the surface of the sun. Unlike our day on Nha Trang beach we had chosen the hottest and brightest day of our stay to visit the seaside and were dripping with sweat within minutes. We sat down at a cafe to have some fried rice for breakfast before bravely stepping onto the sand to secure ourselves a deck chair. We could see for what looked like miles along the shore in both directions and yet could barely see another soul. There were only about 10 deckchairs on the whole beach and only two were taken. We chose two at the other end of the row and felt like we had the whole coastline to ourselves. The sun was far too hot to actually sunbathe so I sat under the parasol while Amy smothered herself in factor 60 sunblock and then went for a swim.
China Beach gained fame during the Vietnam War as was the
landing point for many US troops arriving in the country. The beach was also used as a rest and relaxation spot by soldiers stationed nearby and was the location of the infamous scene in Apocalypse Now where an American GI surfs while you can see a village being destroyed behind him. The waves can become quite high and it is now Vietnam's top spot for surfing. And these days, Charlie does surf. Quite well apparently. The 20 mile beach was also listed in Forbes as one of the most luxurious in the world and a new resort has been opened recently to cash in on the tourism industry that is still only in its infancy along the huge stretch of sand.
After a couple of hours of baking in the shade I ventured out into the sun, complete with lots of sunblock, and could only stand it for 10 minutes before I had to get back under the parasol. It didn't matter that we couldn't sit in the direct sunlight because just sitting and watching the big waves break while not another sound was audible was more than enough for a couple of hours. Around 1pm I wandered back
to the road a few minutes away and got a couple of ice creams and a cold beer each for us to enjoy before we met our driver at 2pm and headed back to town. When we arrived we had lunch in a nice riverside restaurant before walking across the Japanese Bridge to a Propoganda Posters shop that Hugo and Jess had recommended. It was fascinating looking at all of the slogans and old fashioned pictures that must have been everywhere until tourism took hold in Vietnam and westerners were encouraged to visit. You still see some posters on lampposts and walls, especially around less touristy areas like Ninh Binh but the ones that are clearly anti-American have disappeared. It was actually quite disturbing looking at the ones that were encouraging locals to kill American soldiers in the name of communism. In the end we decided that we couldn't afford the original prints (they were around 100 US dollars!) and decided on a few greetings cards instead. Some of them were actually quite quaint and we both really liked one that bore the message "Water is silver, rice is gold" above a scene of traditional Vietnamese farmers.
The next
morning we went to the travel agents who had organised the final leg of our bus ticket up to Hanoi and waiting for the bus to turn up. While waiting we got chatting to the guy behind the desk who was very impressed with our Vietnamese. He found it very amusing that we'd learnt some of the langauge and even entrusted the shop to our care while he popped out to the shops for five minutes. Five minutes turned into ten, which turned into fifteen and by the time he got back I had been answering the phones in broken Vietnamese and helping Western customers for nearly half an hour! It was an odd but very amusing episode.
We finally got on the bus with a hearty goodbye and handshake from the travel agent and headed back to Hanoi for our last couple of days in Vietnam and South East Asia having decided that Hoi An was definitely one of our favourite places.
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Wildh2o
David Boss
Very nice synopsis. Some really good suggestions too. Its good to know about the hotel and taylors in Hoi An. I plan on going there myself in the next few weeks to have some suits made. One question: On average how much does it cost for a decent suit? Also, is it easy to have things shipped home? Thanks again for the travel update and be safe. Dave