So, stuff to see. The Japanese covered bridge above was built by the Japanese, shockingly enough, and is the only bridge in the world with a Buddhist temple built onto the side of it. Huh. With your ticket, you can see five 'sights of interest' before needing to buy another. The ticket price is meant to pay for the general upkeep of the various historical buildings, some of which are home to the same families that originally built them. I think the trade-off with the occupied places-of-interest, is that the upkeep gets paid by the admission fees and they in turn let tourists have a nosey around their digs. I wasn't too big a fan of that - I preferred to look around the old Chinese meeting halls to dragging my shabby self into someone's home, not that they seemed to mind.
The main industry in Hoi An, aside from fleecing tourists to be peddled around town on one of the ubiquitous cyclo-rickshaw things for an hour, is clothing. These days there are hundreds of tailor-shops, some of which are your traditional on-site tailors, many have workshops out of town, and a load more just sell cheap imported clothes from China. Paying your money and taking your chances, you can have a made-to-measure suit and a dozen shirts made up in a couple of days. Many people bring shirts or dresses from home to be copied. I resisted getting a suit done, as this trip has...ahem...distorted my dimensions somewhat, but Chan had some trousers made. Customer service wasn't great, but they did turn it around in 24 hours, including fitting.
We popped into The Lifestart Foundation, a workshop and store run by a charity for disabled people (go here and give them all your money), where we had a half-hour lesson in Vietnamese. Obviously now I'm fluent. Chan has subsequently got saying "Hello!" (Xin chào!), asking for the bill (Xin tính tiền) and "Very good!"(rất tốt!) down pat, so we're sorted.
Food tour time again. This time with Vespa Adventures. As the name suggests, they zipped us around town on Vespas, marking us out as the elite of the moped community - even if I was holding on to a bloke who was approximately one third my body mass. On our tour was the two of us and a nice chap from Canada named Greg.
We started off in Cafe Zoom, which is owned by the tour company. There we had some street food from outside. Being seasoned travellers and discerning connoisseurs of food consumed 6 inches off concrete, we made sure to look about for the quality-assuring quantities of pavement detritus.
Next stop involved us being zipped around the corner to a restaurant owned by a Chinese family who are the sole holders of the recipe for the region's famed "White Rose" dumplings. They have a regular production line going on in the kitchen, as these dumplings are sold to all the local restaurants. We joined in and made an enthusiastic mess. They cooked up our efforts very separately from another plate that were done properly for us.
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| "You make dumpling like stupid monkey" |
We were then driven to the riverside, where an old lady took us by bamboo boat to Cam Nam island. She gave me an oar, but I think that was just for her own amusement. We paused briefly to light paper lanterns and launch them on the water. Chan was reassured that the lanterns are recovered later for re-sale, but she wore her sceptical face.
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| "Here, have some fire." |
On the island we had river clams and squid. The clams are shell-less and tiny - the grey stuff in the top picture below is a pile of clams. They are eaten with the local rice-based poppadom-looking thing. Not that fussed about them, to be honest.
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| Beer was included, by the way. Sold. |
The local rice wine was served out of a responsibly un-marked mineral water bottle, it being another example of the various ways we've discovered one can make hooch out of rice in ones kitchen. Like the others we've tried, it tastes like filthy sake. This stop was a bit unnerving for Chan as some manner of large cockroach or cicada-type bug kept jumping out of an overhanging tree and clinging to her back.
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| I don't know what it is, but I've probably eaten it at least once. |
On our way to the last stop - a nice restaurant that's built within a rice paddy- apparently the standard Vespa route was disrupted by some building work, as there was a JCB-type backhoe parked across the road. The crew just waved our drivers unter the machine's extended support struts (you know, those legs they extend to stop it falling over when used), which would be dandy if I wasn't about half a foot taller than the Vietnamese average. I realised at the last second that I wasn't ducking low enough and, in my haste to retain my head, knocked my driver and put us both in a pile of gravel.
Once recovered, our last place was serving up venison, which we prepped by rolling in a local leaf to stop it burning, and barbecued it on a table-top cooker.
Madam Khánh's bánh mì is deemed definitive -and she's had 30 years to work on it- and contains: pâté, pork char siu, sausage, fried egg, homemade pickles, papaya, carrots, parsley, chili sauce, soy sauce, and her secret sauce. It was phenomenal.
At nighttime, Hoi An is lit-up, the tat sellers take to the streets, and the tourists concentrate on eating and drinking.
One place to have a cocktail and peer down at the river is the GAM museum, which has a collection of very unusual carved gemstones, which you can peer at bemusedly while sipping a cocktail.
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| And you thought you didn't need to see a skull carved from a 10,000 karat pink sapphire |
Breaking sightly from the obvious tourist mould, we took a cab to Vinahouse Space, which is on the outskirts of town. It's Vietnam's largest architecture museum in that they have restored several complete houses from various points in the last 300 years.
Nearby. a lady was preparing traditional rice noodles for the on-site restaurant. We were encouraged to have a try at chopping them up ourselves. Chan never quite worked up the momentum (not being allowed near knives at home), and my attempt turned into a doughy melee.
Apparently we were so delightful to speak to that our guide, Ngọc Bích (henceforth known as the Anglicised "Jade") commanded that we come back at 5pm, pick her up and drive half an hour up the road to her parents' place, so that she could show us around. Never wishing to turn down such a generous offer, we came back and got her when she clocked out.
Jade's family live in a farming village, where they farm rice and peanuts. They've diversified, like many others, into fish farming and so have several large lined ponds in their grounds. They keep a couple of pigs too. Jade's brother and his wife live here, and so we got to meet Jade's baby nephew. Chan was pleased, as she has a long-running obsession with Asian babies.
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| She gave him back eventually |
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| The pigs liked me too. My appeal is universal. |
It was really nice to be invited back like that. The family are lovely and it was really interesting to see how people live here. It was a real privilege to be shown such hospitality. All over Vietnam, people have gone out of their way to be friendly, and Jade's invitation really made our day. Her English is really good too, which is for the best because Chan's three phrases of Vietnamese have limited conversation potential.
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| And I've never felt taller |
Rather than a hotel, in Hoi An we were booked into a homestay, owned and run by the Tran family. On our last day, we helped cook lunch with the family who own the place. "Helped" is the verb I'm rolling with. If we count this meal, Chan has cooked 17 times since we've been together. For reference, we first got together in 2001. Anyhow, the young bloke helping Chan with the spring rolls below is Tri. He does the admin and deals with the customers and so can speak decent English. His gran, who definitely runs the kitchen, spoke about two words of English and laughed good-humouredly at every single thing we did or said, every time she saw us.
I'm not sure how many meals they would normally eat, but I think that we were getting a taste of everything, so this was us for the day. Tri kept putting things in Chantelle's bowl, to make sure she was thoroughly fed and got to try everything. This is a Thing One Does Not Do - ask her parents- but she was diplomatic about it and put anything she didn't want in my bowl when no-one was looking.
The homestay is on An Hoi (Vietnamese is apparently short on unique syllables, but long on incredibly subtle intonation), an islet with a bridge over to Old Town. The streets outside turn into a night market when the sun goes down, not that that stopped taxis driving down them while vendors and pedestrians wheeled out of the way. One of the street vendors there sold doughnut-type things and various frittered fruits, all of which were objectively awful, but she took a shine to us and we ended up buying a couple of things from her every time we walked back in the evening. She made sure to give us a hug on our last night, as she'd remembered when we said we were leaving.
Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: In Hoi An blieben wir bei einer Gastfamilie . Das Essen war ausgezeichnet und wir dazu beigetragen, eine traditionelle Mahlzeit zuzubereiten. Wir hatten eine Tour mit Vespa Mopeds. Das war spannend.
