Hoi An
After 18 hours or so on the train. I arrived in Da Nang, the closest city to Hoi An with a train station. From here I took a cab with a young, camera happy British girl named Libby. Like me, she was meeting someone in Hoi An and would need to contact them once we got into town. She’d been travelling for quite a while too, having gone to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia and was making her way through Vietnam before heading onward to Laos, and later on India. She was just a huge ball of energy, I wondered if I had that much energy when I first travelled around.
The cab let us off somewhere in the middle of Hoi An, at the edge of the pedestrian-only section. Fortunately half a block up the road was an internet cafe with a phone. We contacted our travel mates and it turned out we were staying pretty close to each other. We walked to our respective guesthouse and said “bye for now, maybe I’ll see you later” to each other. I got settled in the room, cleaned up and waited for Jody to come by.
Jody came in, sunburned from his morning at the beach and we compared notes about our trip up. I told him about the kids playing Look A Foreigner! with me, and he told me about the girl he’d shared a compartment with, who’d been to India and now wanted to dye her blond hair brown. He also said he was ready to move on to Hue the next day. I told him I probably wouldn’t be, since I’d just gotten to town and knew I’d want to spend at least 2 days in Hoi An. I was still tired from my long train ride, so I relaxed and walked around for the rest of the afternoon, while Jody took the bike he rented and rode off to one of he nearby island-villages. That evening we had a great meal near the water and had “fresh beer”, one of the cheapest in the world, at 5000 dong (about 30 cents) a glass. The owner of the restaurant was trying to get us to come out to his village the next day, but we declined. We wandered more around the city, looking at the tailor shops. Hoi An is *the* place to go in Vietnam to get clothes made. Since the shorts I’d brought on the trip were getting ratty and too big (I was going to toss them at the end of the trip in any case), I poked my head in a few places.
The next day after choosing a place to get pants (1 pair zip off cargos and 1 pair capris with a dragon on the leg), I rented a bicycle and rode to the beach. The first one I went to, An Bang was beautiful and nearly deserted. However, I’d forgotten to bring my bathing suit and had all my valuables on me, so after a while I got back on my bike, stopped off at the guesthouse and rode to the much busier Cua Dai beach. Funny enough, I ran into Libby there, along with her friend and some people they’d met. I spent the rest of the day and most of the evening with them.
For my last day in Hoi An I wandered around the streets of the old town. The entire old town area is considered a historical site, and within this are over 20 museums and landmarks. Jody and I had stopped by a few the day before, and I saw a couple more the next day.
Next up – Hue
(I was in Hoi An April 15-17)
Categories: Robin's Travel blog
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