Silk & Perfume

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I took the night train from Nha Trang to Danang, about a ten hour journey starting at just before midnight. The beds were in a sort of 'cabin' berth with two bunk-beds in, and there were two other people already in the 'cabin' when I got on the train - one of whom was in the wrong bed! Of course they didn't speak English and I didn't speak their language but after a while it was sorted out. I took a while to get off to sleep but then slept well until we were almost at Danang, at around 10am. At Danang I took a xe om (motorcycle taxi) to Hoi An. The driver was quite friendly but when we stopped at a cafe for Vietnamese coffee out came the maps, photos guestbook full of comments (all positive of course) from past tour customers. I hadn't planned on taking any tours, and taking a polite interest in what he was showing me was of course interpreted as being interested. In the end I said I'd think about it, and when we got to Hoi An we went to a tailor shop which he presumably has some relationship with, and he said that if I changed my mind I could go back there and they'd give him a call. I checked into a guesthouse nearby, the My Chau Hotel (review here).

Later in the afternoon and the next day I spent most of my time looking around the tailors and silk shops. Not only are there at least 300 tailor shops in Hoi An, but each of them has a different range of fabrics from the next, especially for shirts; and each of the tie shops has a totally different choice of colours and patterns. Before I came here I wasn't sure if it was going to be worth sending a package home to England, especially as I'd already done so with two pairs of trousers I bought in Penang. Once I bought the green silk shirt I'm trying on in the picture above, though, and a few of my favourites from the town's range of $5 silk ties, there was no going back. It's not so long now before I'll be starting to look for jobs, and I decided to have a charcoal suit made, along with a couple of plain formal shirts. At a third place, a stall in the cloth market, I had a couple of pairs of casual trousers - something that I didn't see at all in Penang - and shirts made.

The shop I bought the deep green shirt at, 41 Le Loi, differed from the others in that (at least some of) the silk was made in-house, and the first time I went in I was given a short guided tour to the process. I didn't visit the silk factory when I was in Da Lat so I really found it informative - not that I needed any further encouragement to buy when I saw this shirt on the rail! I chose the suit and formal shirts at B'lan Silk, one of the two tailors which had a lot of recommendations on online forums; for instance this post at Thorn Tree. After I chose the material and was measured up for the suit, B'Lan (the owner) invited me back to her house, which is where the clothes are made, for some food and coffee. I tried an unusual Vietnamese fruit, called a vu sua, which looked like an apple but tasted somewhere between a banana and mango. In the cloth market, Forget-Me-Not sold me the casual trousers and shirts. I chose her after reading this blog article, and I was pleased how well the first couple of things fitted so I ordered some more, including getting one of my shirts copied with some fabric I brought to her from another shop. She was also able to make a couple of ties I brought from other places - such as a tie matching the green shirt that I bought at 41 Le Loi - narrower for me.

Apart from all the clothes shopping, there was time for exploring this picturesque town and eating some delicious food. The definite highlight - so good I went there three times in the five days I was here which is unlike me - was the 'white rose' (banh bao vac), a folded white rice pancake with shrimp and delicious thin citrus sauce with lemongrass and chilis. The first time I came here I asked for a baguette to dip into the sauce. I also visited Ong Bee, a restaurant which had a sign outside 'Highly Recommended by TripAdvisor', which is true and the food was indeed very good.
After taking everything I bought to B'lan to arrange for it to be mailed back home, and going back the next morning to fill in a form and collect the receipt I have to keep in case the clothes don't show up in England in a few weeks time, I checked out of the My Chau and took an afternoon bus for the relatively short trip up the coast to Hue (pronounced 'hway'😉.

One of the only things I knew about the city before setting off from the UK was that it was the home of a group of 'deaf mute' restaurants. A humorous book of travel lists told the story of how there was once a restaurant owned by a deaf and mute man which was lauded, and recommended in guidebooks. Subsequently, other restaurants - also with 'deaf mute' proprietors - opened on the same street with similar names, confusing travellers. On my way to the old city across the bridge over the Perfume River, I went to take a look. Indeed, there are three restaurants, called Lac Thien, Lac Thanh and Lac Thuan, within less than 100yds of one another. I tried the former two during my time here, and while both were good value I found Lac Thanh to have the tastier food and the better service of the two, though I'm still none the wiser as to which, if any, is the original 'deaf mute' restaurant.

I went to explore the city's historic centre, the citadel. The city was the capital of Vietnam between 1802 and 1945, when the country was ruled by the Emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty. There are actually two 'citadels', one inside the other. The outer walled city contains a lot of streets on which residences and businesses are still located, while the inner 'Royal Citadel' or 'Imperial Enclosure' is now more of an outdoor museum. Entrance to this walled and gated area, and the central 'Forbidden Purple City' which was once restricted to the royal family, concubines and most senior officials, required the purchase of a ticket for a few dollars worth of dong. I looked around the ruins for a while, met a quite interesting fellow traveller who talked about how he worked as a director on television commercials and took a few photos. Just as I was about to leave I saw some people in costume getting on board an elephant that had been leashed in a field, so I stayed around and took some of the pictures as shown below. I was beginning to feel a bit under the weather by this point, though, and after a quick bite to eat I went back to my hotel, the Phong Nha (review here) and went to bed early. I didn't sleep very well and developed a heavy head cold; I was sneezing a lot during the night and the next day, and didn't venture far from the hotel that day or the day after. Fortunately the hotel had good wi-fi so I was kept occupied with that and with reading and commenting on the updated manuscript (following up from my PhD) for resubmission that I was e-mailed at the weekend.

The only direct (not requiring a change of vehicle) bus operated by Sepon Travel through the Laos border from Hue to Savannahket runs every other day, leaving early in the morning, and because I wasn't up for travelling when I felt unwell I didn't get the bus on Thursday 7th as I originally planned, meaning two extra nights in Hue. On Friday I decided to take a look around the Dong Ha Market, which was definitely a sight worth seeing, piled high with wholesale foods even if I didn't really buy much - apart from a compass. I had one, but it went missing in Hoi An, and before that I'd found it invaluable in not getting lost as I explored new places. I had another tasty Vietnamese coffee at an outdoor cafe and tried to explain that I was looking for a compass to the old men sitting there who didn't speak any English, by drawing on a piece of paper. After asking about 10 people I finally found a stall that had a compass for sale. Shame it was twice as big as my last one and twice the price too! Oh well, at least one person at the market made a profit that day, and I have a compass again.

Overall I found visiting Hoi An to be an agreeable place. Its narrow, low-traffic streets and colourful riverside were pleasing to the eye, there were attractive restaurants and I was pleasantly surprised by the relative lack of touts on the street, and the politeness of the salespeople in (most of) the shops and other businesses, and didn't encounter any money-related problems here as I did in Da Lat and Nha Trang. My impression of Hue was undoubtedly coloured by the fact I was not feeling 100%!d(MISSING)uring much of my time there, but also the impossibility of walking down the street without being hassled by pushy drivers, shouting "hey" from across a road junction and doing the characteristic 'motorbike' hand gestures. As with Phnom Penh, there were too many moto and tuk-tuk drivers in Hue for the amount of available custom. Added to this, I went with a driver across the bridge over the river, agreed on a price of 15,000 ("fifteen") dong - and when we reached the destination he claimed the agreed price had been 50,000 ("fifty"), even though I'd spelt out "one-five" before getting in the tuk-tuk. Annoying. I gave him 20 and made clear he wasn't getting any more.

In the end, while there were definitely reasons to recommend Vietnam, this sort of thing happened often enough (and was reported by other travellers) that I think it's reasonable to warn the potential visitor that this sort of thing is not unusual and that there is certainly a grain of truth to the suggestions I'd read before visiting the country that, to quote one of those links, "everybody you meet is trying to get money out of you". How will Laos be...?

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Comments

[Anne & Vic]

Another interesting and informative blog, love the photos. Your comments on local culture and warnings of financial pitfalls will be useful to future travellers. We see that, apart from the compass, no-one has managed to con or extract money from you! The green silk shirt looks great, we look forward to the arrival of your other purchases. Hope you are feeling fully fit again. Take care.