6th - 7th November 2011
Having sorted out the hotel we decided to get back out and do the tourism we came to do. Hoi An is a smallish town on the banks of the river Thu Bon which had, like every other river in SE Asia, burst its banks and flooded parts of town. Nothing deeper than calf level though, no biggie – we've seen worse. Having marked on the map the little walking tour that takes you past most of the Chinese meeting houses, pagodas and temples, we decided to just wander around and see where that took us instead.
After a while we came across a small quiet temple with a rose garden and lots of bonsai trees, a lady came up and spoke to us, complimenting us on being such a lovely couple and welcoming us to Vietnam, and then asked us if we needed any clothes, because she had a good shop and were we really sure we didn't want any clothes tailor made, very good price?
We thanked her and moved along. Hoi An was a centre for trade for about four hundred years from the 15th century. They traded with the; Chinese, Japanese (at least when they were allowed to leave Japan pre 1637), the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Indians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Thai, French, British and the Americans. Traders from China and Japan would stay for months at a time and set up small warehouses and in time permanent staff to handle off season business. These dudes were the first to colonise and the Chinese influence lingers on, throughout Vietnam. Hoi An was also the first place in Vietnam to be exposed to Christianity and to the 17th century missionary French priest Alexandre de Rhodes who set out the Latin-based quoc ngu script for Vietnamese.
History lesson over because despite the abundance of Chinese meeting houses and temples and pagodas etc. etc. we didn't actually go inside one. The old part of town is no classed as a heritage site and as such you have to pay entrance fees to visit all these places. The tickets didn't cost much but I think it's fair to say that we were more interested in the market, the streets and on having lunch. So we strolled down streets, took pictures of clothes shops, birds in cages and the beautiful yellow buildings.
Everything was small and quaint and very touristy, but in a nice way. We visited the covered Japanese bridge where a photographer was taking some very stiff portraits of couples in love (or in boredom).
We had lunch in the old market, another beautiful yellow building, the streets outside covered to protect goods from the rain and shoppers as they perused wares. We had a local speciality; Cao Lau, noodles that are something between pasta and rice noodles, a small amount of savoury sauce, croutons, thin slivers of pork and lots of salad leaved.
We waded over a lovely little bridge, almost submerged in the rising waters of the river, and headed straight into a restaurant where we spent the rest of the afternoon eating every local dish and drinking lots of the fresh local beer.
The food we tried; white rose, small steamed dumplings with a prawn filling that if you shut your eyes and imagine a white rose, look like white roses, won-ton (this is Chinese surely?!) and fresh spring rolls which weren't a speciality, just something we like. The beer cost less than 25 cents per glass, our little afternoon splurge came to just over 5 dollars. Despite eight beers between us (I know we sound like raging alcoholics but it was very weak beer I promise) we got home in one piece and were good for nothing other than watching films and drinking all the water in our room.
We'd run out of toothpaste so after brushing our teeth with water we had an early night and planned to head a little further up the coast to Hue the following day.
Waking up bright and early I went over the road to get another egg baguette from the same lady who was so busy that she didn't spread anything properly or evenly – we had to spread the chunks of hots chilli paste ourselves. We walked to the bus station and got on a little bus to Danang where buses left for Hue. We managed to get on one that was already half full and didn't take long to leave. We squished oursleves into our seats – the space too little even for my short legs to relax- and then spent two hours looking out the window trying to see the incredible view that the three dudes in Top Gear saw doing the Vietnam special, all we got was rain and grey cloud cover.
We arrived in Hue bus station where it was also raining heavily and got a taxi to a cheap hotel. The cheap hotel smelt musty so we rolled up our trousers and waded through several different streets doing our best to find a cheap place to stay – same old story. I woke an old lady up who was dozing on her sofa, she was easily the loveliest person we had met for a while (those awful tourist bus drivers gave me a real downer) and she gave us a lovely room with a balcony for 7 smackers. Love her!
No comments:
Post a Comment