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Published: August 21st 2009
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We arrived in Danang the next morning after a marathon 16 hour train ride, feeling surprisingly refreshed after a rather decent sleep on the train. We quickly caught a taxi to Hoi An, half an hour away. We were dropped off at a hotel again recommended to us (thanks guys!) and decided to stay here.
Hoi An is a beautiful, charming small town filled with French colonial buildings, a beautiful beach which is 20 minutes away by bicycle, a river which at night is filled with colourful lanterns. But the thing which Hoi An is most famous for is it's tailors, of which there are apparently over 500! Jen was in heaven from the moment she stepped off the bus, looking at all the different things she could have made. With this in mind, we spent the first few days deciding where and what to buy. We also spending as much time at the beach as we could as this was the first beach we had been to in our travels, however the sea didn't manage to cool us down quite as much as we had hoped, it was more like being in a hot tub without the bubbles! After
a couple of days in Hoi An and speaking to some fellow travellers, we decided Nha Trang was not worth leaving Hoi An for, as we were having such a great time we decided to extend our stay by two days.
We spent a day hiring motorbikes to ride out to My Son temple. The trip ended up being more about the journey and not the destination, as My Son was slightly disappointing after the temples of Angkor, and without realising it we had walked around the entire site in half an hour. A lot of tour buses head out to My Son in the morning, so we decided to try to leave early so we could get there before then. We headed off reasonably early, but within 20 minutes Simon and Tor's bike had a puncture. It just so happened (as it seems to everywhere in Vietnam!) that they broke down outside the house of someone who could fix the tyre, or so he thought. First he tried to repair the puncture, then when that failed he replaced the inner tube, as he just happened to have a spare one lying around. We finally headed off, only to
discover that the tyre was starting to go down again after about 100 metres. We stopped again,. luckily this time outside an actual mechanic (well as much as you get in Vietnam!) where we discovered the problem was actually that the inner tube he had replaced it with was too small! We had quite a crowd of new friends as all the locals stopped what they were doing to look at these funny white people, and told us through sign language that we should be more covered up because our skin will go brown and that's bad! We finally headed off to My Son, a trip which took 3 hours there and 1 hour on the way back! Luckily, by the time we finally got there, most of the tour buses had already left for the day.
The food in Hoi An was amazing. They have two specialities in particular, fried wontons and Cau Lau, which is a noodle dish unlike anything anywhere else in Vietnam. It became a bit of a daily routine to have both of these at least once a day, and we found the most amazing street stalls (again by recommendation) where the wontons were
freshly made (unlike all the restaurants who buy them in) and were undoubtedly the best in town. Here you could also get 'fresh beer' for less than 40 cents a glass, so needless to say, we stopped here a few times.
On our last day (although we would have loved to stay even longer, but thought we might never leave if we did!), we attended a cooking class where we learnt how to make Cau Lau for ourselves, and also some delicious spring rolls and noodle dishes. It was a great setup, where we had 1 teacher for the 3 of us, and Simon joined us once we had finished to test out our cooking! We also went on a boat ride up and down the river, something we had been harassed about ever since we had arrived, and it seemed like a good idea to get Jen away from the tailors before she tried to purchase something else!
After one final meal of Wontons and beer, we packed up our (significantly heavier!) bags - of which we both had to purchase an extra one just to fit all our new clothes, and boarded our 'sleeper' bus to
take us to Nha Trang, where we had booked a bus to take us to Dalat. The sleeper bus is a very interesting concept, and probably great if you're Vietnamese sized. However it's definitely better than sitting on a normal bus for 12 hours, and we all managed to get some sleep.
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