Hoi An
Trip Start
May 12, 2005
1
10
33
Trip End
Sep 11, 2005
Hoi An,
Vietnam
Saturday, June 4, 2005
The town is on a river, which floods nearly every year, meaning everyone has to get about by boat for a few days. The watermarks are visible on some of the houses and temples, but particularly clear on the covered Japanese bridge - quite a rarity in Vietnam - which was specifically designed to withstand floods and earthquakes!
Hoi An used to be one of Vietnam's major trading centres, as it is just a few kilometres upstream from the South China Sea and one of the houses I visited had been built by a wealthy Chinese merchant 300 years ago. The little old man who showed me around told me he was the seventh generation of his family to live in the house and pointed out the Chinese-influenced architecture: roof supports in groups of three and five (lucky numbers for the Chinese); and patterns carved into pillars that represented Chinese symbols for long life and prosperity. I was the only tourist there and half-way round, while I was asking questions about his house and family, he started leading me round by the hand to point out different things. He didn't let go til I left.
I visited some important 8-11th century temples built by the Champa kingdom at My Son (meaning "beautiful mountain") about 20km from Hoi An on a half-day tour. Although the temples had survived intact until the mid 20th century, they are now little more than ruins - the US bombed a lot of them to pieces when it was rumoured the Viet Cong were hiding out there and only stopped after Nixon was personally petitioned on the issue. The site has been cleared of debris and unexploded ordnance, but seeing bomb craters right next to the ruined temples really brings home the scale of devastation caused here by the war in a way that other bomb craters - hardly noticeable now they have been turned into ponds and fields - don't.
The thing that Hoi An is most famous for - apart from the lovely old buildings - is its tailors. Lots of cloth is made locally, including silk in gorgeous colours and pretty nearly everyone visiting the town gets tailored clothes made. I was no exception: two suits, two shirts, linen trousers, an "ao dai" (Vietnamese national costume - but eminently suitable as silk pyjamas!) and a pair of trousers for Andrea. All beautifully made, in less than 24 hours, for just 210 US dollars! Fantastic. They're now on a slow boat, and should (hopefully) arrive home just before I do.
The sheer number of tailors and shoe shops means there are lots of lovely shops and stalls in the market to look at, but unfortunately means fierce competition for your business. In addition to the usual 'moto' and 'cyclo' drivers hassling you as you walk around (and really, Hoi An's not big enough to justify anything other than walking) there are touts for the tailors, often young girls who try to get you talking ("Where you come from?" "Wha's your name?") in the hopes of enticing you into their shop. It can get quite wearing after a while.
So, to escape, I hired a bike from the hotel one afternoon and cycled around the little villages surrounding Hoi An, with the vague idea of finding the beach, but found a much more interesting route meandering through the pathways between the rice paddies. After getting completely lost - and very nearly chased by a couple of dogs - I found myself there, having not seen a single other Westerner for a couple of hours.
I also booked myself on a morning's cookery class with Hai (see below) from Hai's Scout Cafe, one of the best places for Vietnamese food in Hoi An.
The cookery class started with a guided walk through the local markets, with Thuy, our guide, showing us how to tell whether the fruit, vegetables and fish were fresh and introducing us to the spices, herbs and other ingredients typically used in Vietnamese cooking. We were then taken to the cookery school, twenty minutes downstream, and shown around its vegetable garden.
We had a go at making rice paper, Vietnamese savoury pancakes, sweet and sour squid and vegetables, aubergine cooked in a clay pot and some typical food decorations out of cucumber and tomato. Unfortunately my rice paper got a bit of a hole in it and my decorations weren't anything like the originals! Never mind. The whole group - about sixteen of us - all sat down to eat the food we'd made for lunch and it was delicious.
I keep bumping into travellers I've met further south, including Aaron, the Aussie from the Mekong delta trip/Saigon; a couple of girls from my trip to the Cu Chi tunnels; and a couple of Brits who were just arriving at my guesthouse in Nha Trang with the lovely old couple as I was leaving. But also meeting new people all the time - including Alan (British) and Louise (Australian) from my cooking course, who I went out to dinner with that evening; and Sarah from Worcester who was so fed up with her HR job, she jacked it in, sold her house and is now on a 15-month round-the-world trip. Five months in, she's not entirely sure she's going to bother going home!! Hmmm...
Cathy
