After our senses overload in Ho Chi Mihn City, we chose Hoi An as our next destination in Vietnam. To save ourselves many tiring hours on a bus or train, we booked a 75-minute flight to Danang, the nearest airport to the small town of Hoi An some 30 minutes away.
As we performed the usual circus act of determining the most scam-free and cost-effective method of transportation to our hotel, out of nowhere, came this lovely French couple, who were heading in the same direction as us, to ask us if we wanted to share a cab, to whom we replied, of course we would! So off we went towards Hoi An after having negotiated an acceptable price with our cab driver. We ended up staying at the same hotel with Anne Sophie and Yanneque, who would turn out to be our travelling companions for the next week or so.
Hoi An was an absolute breath of fresh air for two country-loving folks like us. It is very clear that cities are not our favourite environment but we seem to be able to tolerate them better and better all the time. This absolutely charming little town is set on the Thu Bon River and was an international trading port as far back as the 17th century. Chinese, Japanese, and European cultures are well preserved and evident in the local architecture and art of this town. Hoi An Old Town has been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, preserving the town’s historic architecture. Tickets can be purchased which give you entry into some of the heritage sites such as temples, houses, and assembly halls.
Before exploring Old Town to any extent, we booked a half-day tour to visit ancient ruins in yet another Unesco World Heritage Site in the ancient Cham city of My Son (pronounced Me Sun). The tour took us 35-kilometers by bus southwest of Hoi An to the ruins which are quite remarkable and set in a lush valley surrounded by hills and a mountain.
This mystical site was deemed a religious site by King Bhadravarman in the 4th century and remained active until the 13th century which is known as the longest period of development of any city in the Mekong region.
Rather than taking the bus back, we opted for a leisure two-hour long-tail boat ride back to Hoi An via the great Mekong River. We were served lunch as we cruised at a snail’s pace down the river and took in all the scenery around us.
Along the way, we stopped at both a ceramic village and a wood working village where we had the opportunity to watch locals do their crafts and see the attractive results of their meticulous and detailed work and had a sneak peak of their way of life. We got such a kick out of watching this young girl turn the pottery table with her foot like there was no tomorrow!
We thoroughly enjoyed roaming the small streets and alleys of Hoi An Old Town, especially at night when it is cooler and the ambiance is quite romantic. You literally feel like you have gone back 150 years in time.
Along the river are several statues which are all lit up at night. We spent a great deal of time just strolling along the streets and admiring the architecture and special sites such as the Japanese Covered Bridge which was built by the Japanese community of Hoi An to link up with the Chinese quarters across the stream.
The streets are lined with shops and restaurants of all kinds, including plenty of lavish upmarket restaurants that are quite costly by Vietnam standards, but cheap by Western standards. We enjoyed one such restaurant one night called Good Morning Vietnam. This restaurant is owned by two Italian chefs and they serve up the best pasta we have had in a long time… a great break from the rice and noodles for sure!
As many restaurants as there are, there are A WHOLE LOT MORE tailor shops! Many cities in Asia have many tailor shops where they can whip you up pretty much any piece of clothing from scratch for a very good price, but Hoi An takes the cake on this one, and by far! There are literally hundreds of them in this small town. On one street block, we counted no less than ten consecutive tailor shops. These shops can make just about anything and usually within a single day at a very low price, like $75 for a man’s cashmere silk-lined suit or lady’s gown! You can take in a picture of an outfit from a magazine, choose your fabric out of the rows and rows of it that litteraly reach the ceiling, let them take all your measurements, and a day later, VOILA!, you have that outfit you always wanted and its a perfect fit for a fraction of the cost! Pretty hard to pass this up and its quite addictive. We talked to several tourists in Vietnam who had up to four and six outfits/suits made! Believe it or not, we actually didn’t crack and didn’t get one single thing made. How? You may ask? We are not sure but certainly the fact that our backpacks were already packed to the max and we have already paid an arm and a leg several times to ship “stuff” home which we’ve accumulated, certainly had a lot to do with it. As the popular backpacker saying goes, “you buy it, you carry it”!
On one particular day, after renting a motorbike to explore more of the beautiful countryside around Hoi An, we met Yanneque and Anne Sophie at our hotel and headed to the beach only four kilometres from town on a couple of motorbikes. Friends of Yanneque and Anne Sophie had recommended a barbeque seafood supper on the beach which turned out to be one of our favourite experiences in Vietnam.
The beach was full of locals just kicking back and relaxing with their families after a day’s work. Many little stalls were set up directly on the sand underneath this canapy of palm trees with one little charcoal barbeque about 12 inches in diameter to cook all kinds of different marinated fish, including crab which we had and was absolutely delicious!
Of course, as soon as we sat down, the vendors started paying us some visits in hopes that we would buy something. We appeared to be some of the only tourists there so it wasn’t hard to understand why they were quite persistent. We did, however, enjoy their company for a while before we ordered our food and then bought our share from them to help out at least a little. Anne Sophie is Vietnamese, was born in Vietnam and raised in Europe. We thoroughly enjoyed watching the reaction of other Vietnamese when they saw her. They approached her with big smiles and talked to her in Vietnamese and she had to explain over and over that she does not speak Vietnamese which was hard for them to understand. We feel travelling with her really enriched our experience in Vietnam. As special as some of our experiences were for us in Vietnam, we knew they were all that much more special for her which was fun to experience along with her.
Each barbeque stall had this strip of sand between them and the water where they laid out a number of reed mats for their customers to sit on to enjoy their meal. Unfortunately we did not catch on to this quickly enough and we didn’t order our food from the same stall as Yanneque and Anne Sophie so we had to separate! It was just not an option to sit in front of any stall except the one you bought your food from. Too funny! After the sunset, all the stall owners placed a lit oil lamp on each reed mat which created such a charming and romantic atmosphere as we watched the sunset over the water and surounding mountains.
After this fantastic unforgettable experience, we were about to find another just as amazing experience. We were fortunate enough to be in Hoi An during full moon when everyone in Old Town shuts off their lights in the evening and the town is all lit up by lanterns that Hoi An is so famous for. So after our wonderful beach dining experience, we headed to the waterfront to take in this special full moon festival. We literally felt like we had gone back in time. The atmosphere was undescribable. As Hoi An is well known for its beautiful lanterns, there are many shops just burning brightlywith all sorts of coloured lanterns.
Part of the custom during this festival is lighting a candle in a paper lotus-shaped bowl and placing it in the river as you make a wish.
You have the option of getting into a small traditional wooden canoe and get rowed around the river where you can place your candle on the water, which the four of us did together. This was truly one of those authentic and genuine experiences which you never forget. As one quietly strolled down the many lantern-lit street, totally absorbed by the smell of wonderful food dishes that were being prepared by the many restaurants and food stalls, along with the Vietnamese music which filled the streets all all the way down and along the river, made for a truely magical Asian experience.
Before heading back to our hotel, we accompanied Yanneque and Anne Sophie to pick up some clothing they had made at one of the tailor shops. Unfortunately the shop had closed earlier than they had indicated and they were gone home. The shop owner next door was nice enough to contact them, so we just sat on the street and took it all in while we waited. Just as we finally left to go back to our hotel, the skies opened up and it began to poor rain which provided us with a very entertaining walk back to our hotel to close out what had turned out to be one of the most memorable days we had in Vietnam.
We did not have any umbrellas and as it poored rain, we danced our way down the streets of Hoi An in complete laughter, having a truly child-like experience of having no care in the world of how wet we got. We pondered on this amazing experience that we were so fortunate to have experienced in this great historic city of Hoi An with our two new friends.
On June 30, it was time to say goodbye to Cambodia and make our long awaited journey through the beautiful country of Vietnam. We had seen so many travel programs on Vietnam which looked amazing and we couldn’t wait to experience this land of beauty, mystic and diversity for ourselves. Watching the older women walk the streets day in and day out wearing their traditional Vietnamese hats and carrying several kilograms of fruit on their shoulder gave us the feel of going back in time. Old Saigon also attracts many American war veterans of the Vietnamese war which come to try and experience this country in a new light.
We started our journey in the south in Ho Chi Minh City (which the locals still refer to by its old name – Saigon). Nothing could have prepared us for this city of millions of motorbikes weaving their way through the maze of streets. The first major thing we noticed on arrival was the urgency we felt from the locals in this city, everyone needed to get somewhere and fast. This took some getting used to after being around such a laid back cultures during the past few months. Everyone drives in a true sense of urgency constantly honking their horns as they try to get by…well…. everyone else! The best way to describe it is to imagine that all drivers act as though they are driving an emergency vehicle such as a police car, ambulance, or fire truck, and using their horn as their sirene. There is clearly a hiearchy of vehicles on the road, as we witnessed in other Asian countries, with the big trucks and buses at the top and the poor pedestrian at the bottom. This is very evident when watching the trucks and buses literally forcing motor bikes off the road to get by. 
Walking the streets poses some pretty serious challenges. You must walk directly on the streets as all the motorbikes are parked on the sidewalks and you get honked at constantly to get out of the way. We soon learned that the honking is indeed for our safety. Rather than just hitting us, they honk as if to say “Move it or lose it! I’m coming through anyway! You can’t say you weren’t warned!”. All of this was quite comical to watch at first until we had to try and cross a street… it soon became scary! We quickly learned that waiting for a break in traffic was not going to work as there aren’t any. We eventually learned from watching the locals that the best way to cross the street is to walk very slowly across the street withouth stopping and to look in the eyes of the drivers that are coming towards you. We have to say once we started to trust that they would somehow just all weave around us, crossing the street got pretty easy. PHEW!
We ventured out on the streets and dodged traffic to explore this ecclectic city. We tried our first bowl of Pho, a staple in Vietnam, particularly in Hanoi. Pho is a noodle soup with either chicken or beef and Vietnamese herbs and spices. The Vietnamese eat Pho at any meal of the day but mostly for breakfast.
We took in a few of the main sites the city had to offer. One of these sites was the Reunification Museum. This palace was built in 1966 and its purpose was to serve as South Vietnam’s Presidential Palace. 
On the morning of April 30, 1975, the day Saigon surrundered, the first Communist tanks in Saigon crashed through the gates of this palace. Since this event, the building has been left just as it was on the day that this happened. 
Another not to be missed site we took time to visit was the War Remnants Museum which really drives home the point on how horrific and brutal the US military action was during the Vietnam War. It tells the story of the victims from their point of view and has numerous pictures on disply of civilians, both adults and babies, seriously injured by the USA’s land mines and the wide spread use of chemical herbicides such as Agent Orange. Outside the museum, US armoured vehicles, artillary pieces, bombs, and infantry weapons are all on display.
To cap off our stay in HCMC and to celebrate the fact we actrually survived, we treated ourselves to a wonderful herb steam treatment and full body massage at the highly recommended l’Apothiquaire Spa.
Spirit Quest 