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Imperial Tourism Part II
Entry 7 of 17 | show all | print this entry |
Our little excursion out of Hoi An was to My Son--this is kind of the Vietnamese version of Angkor Wat on a really really small scale. We just set up a tour through the hotel--the cheap one for six bucks a person. The entire trip is a real argument for spending more the next time I have to bite the bullet and hop aboard a tour.
The whole thing got off to an inauspicious beginning when a taxi and a minivan showed up to the hotel at the same time. Somehow, in the confusion, we got into the taxi who began to drive to. . . God knows where. We were somewhere in the countryside, I think going around in circles because I kept seeing the same mountain. Our driver might have been on something. Eventually, his phone rang, and he realized we were supposed to be going to My Son. There were some calls back and forth. Somehow, however, he managed to find the bus we were supposed to be on and get us on it.
An hour out. My Son is really just some ruins. I'm sure they're interesting, but they are a bit of a let down after having seen Angkor. On the way back, the bus dropped us off a ways out of Hoi An and we got on a boat. This was where it got bad. First, the boat began to stop at various factories. No real pressure to buy anything, but it was hot, and Yvette was still a bit sick, and I was ready to get back to Hoi An. We kept sneaking off, only to be pulled back in by the tour guide. Finally, the tour guide announced that we would be seeing some traditional fishing techniques. The boat pulled up to two old people in a Sampan, the guy throwing a net out into the water in a futile attempt to catch fish that did not exist--at this point we were about thirty feet from the Hoi An docks with motor boats whizzing around on all sides. He then produced a long dead fish on a string--tourists ooing and ahing on the boat and flashbulbs popping while Yvette and I were not doing a very good job at hiding our chagrin.
Thoroughly embarassed at having been a part of that, we spent the rest of the day in Hoi An. In contrast to that phony experience, Hoi An does hold an interesting full moon festival. The old town is shut down to traffic, the streets are lit with paper lanterns, there is entertainment, and games and all kinds of things going on and everybody, locals and tourists have a good time. We were lucky that our stop in Hoi An coincided with the festival.
We finally left Hoi An and took a taxi to the Da Nang train station. The coast from Hoi An to Da Nang is one unbroken thirty mile beautiful white sand beach flanked by Cua Dai in the south and China Beach in the north. Probably home to little more than fishing villages even two years ago, the shoreline is now an unbroken string of construction sites--five star super resort upon super resort--the ten foot high surrounding walls are already constructed, the high rises that will follow are already advertised on billboards next to the construction sites. The beaches of Vietnam have been discovered, and the great asshole influx is about to begin.
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