Vietnam – Quite wet this time of year

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Up early yet again to the sound of rainfall and the sight of our street once again underwater… worse than we’d seen it previously,

Breakfast was chicken, bacon and cheese rolls with chilli & garlic sauce (breakfast of champions).

Our car to Hoi An arrived and 0745 and we swam out to the street to get in.

Although the car was several times more expensive than a bus to Hoi An, we were due to stop at a beach, The Marble Mountains and drive over Hai Van Pass. It soon became evident that it was money wasted. Torrential rain pounded the car for almost all of the trip. The beach turned out to be a beach resort where a miserable bunch of octogenerian tourists sat miserably behind their overpriced fruit juices. I’m sure it’s lovely in good weather.

Not long after we hit the Hai Van Pass and discovered our driver did not subscribe to the brake on the straight rule. My finely tuned co-drivers ass felt every slip as the rear of the car wanted to replace the front. We pulled up at the carpark atop the pass and were surrounded by hawkers immediately, one opened my door – I shut it quickly. There was no view – we couldn’t see the other side of the carpark let alone the view from the edge. I’m sure it’s lovely in good weather.

We downed a coffee and hit the road again for the downward leg – similar to the upward leg only with more co-driver braking.

We let our driver know via sign language that we just wanted to get to Hoi An, there was no need to stop at the Marble Mountains. I’m sure they’re lovely in good weather.

We arrived outside out Hotel, The Riverside (vital information that – read on) at midday and were put in a swish room. The balcony was right beside the river but disturbingly, the water had reached the first step up to it.

We walked around the town, although parts of the markets upstream were flooded. There would have been at least 50 shoe shops and 50 more tailors – all making each product to order. With your run of the mill t-shirt, chopstick and buddha statue shops added, the touristy part of town ran three blocks back from the river by a kilometre or so parallel.

A girl at one of the shoe shops where we’d made enquiries took us to an optometrists where I bought a pair of prescription sunglasses for NZ$75. The bloke took my usual glasses and checked the prescription before confirming they would be ready at 1700.

As the rain continued to fall, we decided to look for a bridge upstream from the hotel and would have missed it completely were it not for the two locals on scooters stranded at the top of it. Both ends were under water and the boys on the crest were looking concerned. Small wooden canoe style boats had appeared and were ferrying people around.

We dropped back to the hotel briefly and saw that the river had raised another 6 inches or so and was now up to the next step. The road in front has flooded over the footpath and there were no signs of it letting off.

Hoi An is a bit of a tourist trap – whilst the choice of restaurants was good, each one seemed to be offering the same fare at inflated prices.

We got lucky with the one we ended up in (Bazar Cafe) and had a delicious papaya salad, beef kebabs and seafood noodles. The beer was a new one to us – Larue. It was another light lager – the same as every one we’d tried. The bill came to D360,000 (NZ$24) which was slightly better than we were expecting.

We waded back to the hotel to be told that we would have to go – the staff couldn’t guarantee that our ground floor room would be above water by the next morning. We were told that our accommodation that we had prepaid online in NZ would be paid to our alternative hotel and that we owed the Riverside half a days accommodation. I told the girl that we’d stay – calling the bluff and suggesting we’d go if we didn’t have to pay the half day.

“I checked with my managed and you don’t pay”

We quickly packed and a taxi picked us up from around the corner – he couldn’t stop on our street for fear of the engine taking in water.

Our new accommodation was on the third floor of The Grasslands – about a kilometre or so from the river front and, more importantly, 800 metres from the flood.

Much of our evening had been spent looking online at weather forecasts that suggested thunderstorms for the next five days. We looked into alternatives (even at flights to Cambodia). The rain was showing no signs of letting up… we were in for the long haul.

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