Total Miles Traveled: 47,086
Hoi An is about to explode. Along the highway between Da Nang and Hoi An in central Vietnam, massive hotel resorts and retirement and condo communities are being constructed. There are little patches of normal life interspersed in between, but in a few years, many of these homes lining the street will become storefronts catering to the tourism industry, if they haven’t already.
Hoi An itself is an old port city located a few kilometers upriver from the coast. As such, its architecture is an amalgamation of the many cultures that lived there over the course of its history and because of its beauty, it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In fact, it’s not unlike the old port cities of Penang and Melaka in Malaysia.
There are many old Vietnamese homes you can visit that still have Chinese writing in them. Vietnamese was based on Chinese characters, but was romanized during French colonization.
Here’s one of the popular tourist sites, a bridge built by the Japanese:
Some photos of bikes we like. This one in a home next to a sink:
This one out in the street:
The old town area of Hoi An is set up for tourism, with hotels, restaurants, bars, and most notably, hundreds of tailoring shops where you can get just about anything you want made. In fact, it’s the thing to do in Hoi An. Walk in to any store and you’ll see samples of what you can have made, and in the higher end shops, they have flipbooks, even computers, showing photos with endless possibilities. It’s all a bit overwhelming, but man, it is a big business here. There are rooms full of seamstresses cranking out the suit you just got measured for:
Lisa had some nice clothes made that she was really happy with. If you do go, we recommend Yaly. They’re expensive, but they seem to have their act together.
We also took a cooking class where it started off with a tour of the market.
The class itself wasn’t great – more of a factory than anything. If you’re reading this in anticipation of visiting Hoi An, avoid the [] cooking school at all costs. They cram 30 people in to a room and try to run an interactive class where hot oil and special paring knives are involved, with only 2 helpers – 1 for every 15 people. That is a disaster waiting to happen, folks. On the plus side, the food we made tasted great:
All in all, I’d say you can spend 3 days in Hoi An and be done with it. If the weather is nice, you can stay on the beach like we did and stay longer. Only for us, the weather was cloudy and chilly most of the time. Oh well. At least they had a wifi signal on the beach!
There are a lot more photos from our trip in Hoi An – have a look at the slideshow below:
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Next, we do a tour of how farming and fishing is done in the area. It turned out to be a really good time – stay tuned!