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| Hoi An town |
A bus journey from hell, followed by another, a cold overnight stay in rainy Hue, and a slightly more pleasant bus journey we finally arrive in Hoi An. We check into another great hotel. For only $8 we get a really nice, clean room (with a balcony), hot water, sky TV, WIFI, a swimming pool, and you can even get breakfast in bed! This is so what we need after our horrendous journey to get here. After freshening up we take a walk into the town to explore. Hoi An is a gorgeous ancient town in the south of Vietnam cheap tours. It's warm and sunny, and it’s full of cute cobble streets, with colourful pagodas, temples, old houses, and more bars, restaurants and tailors than anyone could ever need. This is definitely one of my favourite places of the whole trip. We walk through the town and find there’s a river going through it which is lined with really quaint shops and restaurants. At night the place is lit up with candles, Chinese lanterns, and there’s floating sculptures of sea creatures that light up on the river, and a bridge that is lit up and leads to more restaurants on the other side of the river . Although Hoi An is busy, it still manages to keep a chilled out vibe. The first night we ventured to the other side of the river for 60p beers (although we later found 30p beers available on the other side), and ate the local Cao Lao for dinner on plastic stools by the river. We both then had Cao Lao nearly every day. It’s a local dish of green leaves with noodles on top with pork, wantons and some sort of sauce. It’s so cheap, about 70p if you eat it from a street vendor by the river and tastes yummy! We then went to meet Leo, from Paris, who traveled with us form Hue to Hoi An. He’s a really great guy and has been living in Dublin for the last 5 years as the marketing manager for Hostel World. We all got on like a house on fire, and I know John was delighted to have someone he could talk football with!
There is so much to do in Hoi An, lots of historical buildings to visit (all in walking distance, or you can hire a push bike), lots of great food to eat, boat trips on the river, there’s even a beach 5 km from the town. Hoi An is also shoppers heaven. The place is flooded with tailors, and you can ask them to make you anything you want, from a copy of an Armani suit, to a dress pulled out of Heat magazine you’ve seen on your favourite celeb. All made to measure in 1 day, and the feedback we’ve had from other travelers is that the quality is great . Unfortunately we have neither the space our rucksacks or the spare cash for new clothes, however cheap they may be. If we were on our way home or just on holiday I would have had a field day!
We were really pleased to bump into a few backpackers we had met on the journey down here, Adeena from Budapest, Ivy from the Minnesota, and Marcus from Barcelona. They had picked up another fellow traveler on the way, Casha from Poland. It was really nice to see some friendly faces and have a few drinks together.
Other than eat, wander around, eat some more and relax by the river with a few cold 30p beers, we didn’t do much else in Hoi An. We did hire bikes and cycled to the beach one day which was really good fun and we got to see a bit of the outskirts of the town. On the cycle back we stopped at a riverside restaurant (not in the town), for a drink and bumped into Casha. There was such a gorgeous view, and it was lovely and peaceful, and a really nice sunset. Total relaxation.
