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Hoi An’s old town is charming and rich in history.
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The old town is closed to cars. Although you still get motorbikes (except every month on the full moon when motorbikes are banned from the old town), it is still a pedestrian-friendly place.
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The old town is full of buildings of historical and cultural significance. Of course I had to visit the Assembly Hall of the Cantonese Chinese Congregation.
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Temples galore
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Sweet bean curd reminded me of childhood days in Hong Kong.
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Built two centuries ago as the home of a well-to-do Vietnamese merchant, Tan Ky House has been lovingly preserved.
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Wall in courtyard
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Just buy something I wanna go home!
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Japanese covered bridge: the first bridge on this site was constructed in the 1590s. It was built by the Japanese community in Hoi An in order to link them to the Chinese quarters across the stream.
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Motorcycle tour: Sophie getting instructions from Pete.
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Sophie, Matt and Pete, our tour leader.
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Crossing the river.
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I only saw women working in the fields. According to Pete, my observation was correct – women do most of the work in the fields as well as in factories, shops, and at home. What do the men do? Run coffee shops, apparently, and play cards!
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Mending a flat on the runway of an ex US air base.
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This used to be one of the busiest US air base with flighter jets taking off and landing on this very strip every few minutes. This area was devoid of plant life during the war due to the use of Agent Orange. According to Pete, Australians helped manufactured and sprayed the highly toxic chemical. They also sold gum trees to the Vietnamese after the war for reforestation. The chemical Dioxin still affects the deeper layer of the soil. Native trees with deep roots still fail to grow decades after the war ended.
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I felt like becoming a vegetarian.
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Babe?
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Set within the jungles 55km from Hoi An are the ruins of My Son.
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My Son is a Unesco Heritage site and the most important remains of the ancient kingdom of Champa.
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Champa was a Hindu and Buddhist kingdom that controlled what is now Vietnam from approximately the 7th century through to 1832.
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My Son is considered to be a smaller version of the grand cities of Southeast Asia’s other Indian-influenced civilisations: Angkor (Cambodia), Ayutthaya (Thailand), Bagan (Myanmar) and Borobudur (Java).
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Lovely Hoi An
| 32 imagesIt’s a nice change to have a travel companion. Sophie and I met in Nepal in 2009 when we did the Annapurna Base Camp trek. Since then, she has visited Sydney, and we have also spent time hiking in beautiful Tasmania where she lives. We travel well together. She’s easy-going, uncomplicated, always ready to compromise, and we also share many interests travel wise. We also travel on a similar budget. Even our fitness level is similar! It is not easy to find a compatible travel companion. It can be downright nightmarish.
To get to Hoi An, we flew to Danang from Saigon and then took the bus.
We were told to take the yellow bus that will stop just outside our hotel. Great, how convenient! We didn’t really know what to expect, but at $1 a ride ($3 for foreigners, or whatever they feel like charging that day), you can’t really expect too much.
The bus arrived. Two men got off, grabbed our luggage, and pushed us onto the bus rather roughly and really quickly, as if there was some sort of emergency. The bus was crowded, with foreigners, locals and baskets of vegetables, (luckily no live chickens!), bamboo etc. The driver bobbed to loud Vietnamese pop music and honked at other drivers every 30 or so seconds (the Vietnamese LOVE their horns). Luckily, the bus ride was only an hour long as we were standing. It certainly wasn’t a comfortable ride, but it was fun, quick, and hairy at times!
Hoi An is a delightful and quaint Unesco heritage town with lots of well-preserved historical buildings, tea houses, Chinese assembly halls, temples and more. The architecture is mostly a mix of Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese. It is also the first place in Vietnam to be exposed to Christianity. It is very pedestrian-friendly by Vietnamese standards and we thoroughly enjoyed the strolls along the river, and the lantern-lit streets.
There is a lot to do in Hoi An other than seeing the historical centre. Nearby there are beaches, ancient ruins, mountains. You can take a cooking course, ride a bicycle, go diving. One of the highlights for us was the motorcycle tour to My Son Ruins on cult Minsk motorbikes.
Motorbike tour
Both Sophie and I wanted to see the countryside and to get away from the city. More precisely, we wanted to do that on a motorbike. Hoi An Motorbike Adventures seems to get gold stars on every website and guidebook you read. After a cheap, but crap tour in Saigon, we swore to never go down that road again, so although the tour wasn’t cheap, we decided we would do it. After all, you do get what you pay for. As it turns out, it was brilliant.
Pete was our tour leader, accompanied by Yiu, my driver-cum-motorbike mechanic. Matt, who just moved here from Sydney, tagged along in training to be a guide. Pete is a Kiwi who moved here with his family from Queensland four years ago. His wife and he used to own and run an aquatic centre back in Oz. They were asked to come to Vietnam to help with a project training swimming teachers. Vietnam has one of the highest rate of death from drowning. According to Unicef, about 12,000 children die of drowning every year. So Pete and his wife came to Vietnam, and stayed.
It’s been something like 20 years since Sophie’s ridden a bike. Apparently, she used to get around on a dirt bike when she worked in a sheep station in Queensland! She was a little nervous initially, mainly about the traffic and the way people drive here, but after a short practice run and some tips from Pete, she was fine. I, on the other hand, just wanted to be a passenger. It was nice not to have to worry about the traffic, and just enjoy the view.
Pete knows the terrain well, and makes use of beautiful back roads and riverside tracks to get to My Son. It was a great way to see and absorb more of the landscape and local life. We passed through small villages, rice fields, schools. We stopped for Vietnamese coffee (still can’t get used to the condensed milk although I grew up on that stuff – weird). We had a local noodle dish Mi Quang for lunch which was delicious. We even had a flat tyre on an old US Airbase runway. The scenery is in part pretty and idyllic. The village kids are super friendly and high-fiving with them was a lot of fun. Most are curious while some are shy. Some would run out, say hello and then hide behind a tree.
Other than slightly sore bottoms, we had a fantastic day!
A Fish Called Wander 
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