Next stop: Hoi An

As we continued up the coast of Vietnam, our next stop was a beautiful town called Hoi An. What is different about this town is that the old town was not destroyed in the war and the old French colonial architecture is very well preserved. The old town itself is actually a UNESCO World Heritage site and you need to buy a ticket to get into it. However, as there are no boundaries, the ticketing system is completely unenforceable so naturally we didn’t buy any tickets.

It was once a quiet fishing village but the tourists have taken over and it is now home to over 200 tailor shops. Amazingly they all have enough business to survive. While Kadi spent a few days and a few dollars having dresses / coats / tops / etc made up, Conor decided he didn’t need suits (painful memories of work) and just strolled the streets during our time there. It is a very pretty town to be just lazing about: no litter, flowers and trees everywhere, nice architecture, cosy coffee shops, clean and tidy buildings and a river passing through the town as well. In the evening, many of the restaurants and shops switch on old style lanterns outside giving the streets a nice warm glow. All these made it very different from other Vietnamese towns we’ve been to so it’s no surprise that it’s a tourist hotspot.

There’s also a lovely beach nearby. One day we rented bikes and cycled out to it. As we got there, a guy stopped us and told us we must park our bikes in the designated bike park there, telling us we can’t take them any further. He wanted to charge us a parking fee of 5,000 dong (20c) but we started to give out, knowing that the fee should be just 2,000 dong (8c). Yes, we are talking about just a few cents but still he wanted to charge us more than double and we don’t like getting ripped off. 5,000 dong can buy a bottle of water here. After our repeated objections, he finally agreed on 2,000 dong, but he then moved our bikes out of the shade and into the sun. At this stage, we gave up, took our bikes and cycled down to the beach anyway where a restaurant let us park them free of charge. Typical Vietnamese experience of attempted overcharging! Sometimes we are smart enough to avoid it but for sure we get overcharged with loads of things, and probably more often than we realise.

We eventually left Hoi An on a long and painful 16 hour night bus up to the capital, Hanoi. It was probably one of our worst night busses, what with all the bumps and the driver constantly trying to overtake slow moving trucks in front of him, but we won’t start complaining now because it looks like it will have been the last overnight bus journey of our trip.