Hoi An

The second hotel the bus stops at snaffles our business with the promise of $8 twin rooms and a swimming pool. Its V posh and V new, and turns out charges variable rates dependant on how much they think your budget is, we must've looked v scruffy. Hoi An is a small fishing town which used to be an important port a couple of hundred years ago and managed to escape damage from the French & Americans. Its v charming and cute. Probably my favourite place so far. I share with Mark, Innes and Jasper share. We can wave at each other from each wing & our room overlooks the pool. We hit the pool as soon as we can & one of the workers comes out with a camera- promo shots. We stroll into town for a bit of an explore, gobble some lunch then get swallowed by a tailors for several hours. Emma produces some fair clothes for us after several fittings, and it was really cheap. She also cooked an evening meal for us at her house beers included, the day we pick everything up. All the bars and resturants are along the seafront and look gorgeous at night all lit up. We find a place selling cheap local beer and predictably bump into Neil there the second night, well, he is Irish!



The second day we take a walking tour of the town, a ceramic museum, Tan Ky old house and the Japanese covered bridge (which is also a temple). In the old house we were given a tour by a lady who lived there the 6th of 7 generations of the same family to do so. She showed us the distinct architecture, carved bats and pumpkins ( which mean happiness and lots of children respectively- but made me think more of halloween) Chinese mother of pearl writings where each stroke is made from a bird and their confuscius cup, which is v old. And we drank tea with her. On one of the walls are marks showing where the flood levels get to each year, this November's mark is especially high, over the door frames, too high to row a boat through their ground floor. From Hoi An we also visit the nearby Cham ruins, which are impressive but don't cover as large an area as we expect. After that we hire bikes and cycle to the beach, we pass water buffaloes in rice fields on the way. The beach is gorgeous, the water so warm, waves are quite powerful as the sand slopes steeply. Predictably we get pestered a lot to "buy something", every 30 seconds or so, faking being asleep is the easiest option. We return to the beach the next day before our night bus to Nha Trang, the bikes are a bit better and the chains don't fall off!