The main reason you head to Hoi An is the tailoring, and who were we to be any different? Hoi An is absolutely FULL of tailor shops who can run up anything you like in a matter of hours. With the thought of trying to close my ever expanding backpack in mind, I managed to restrict myself to a few items - a couple of things for work, and a couple of things for the rest of my trip. Ben got his first ever suit tailored - ahhhh.
Hoi An itself though is much more than just a town full of tailors - it’s a beautiful old city that has just been named a UNESCO world heritage site. It combines French colonialist architecture with a heavy Chinese influence, and the effect is really quite beautiful. It’s one of the rare places in Vietnam where you don’t take your life into your hands crossing the road - it’s much quieter than the big cities.
The waterfront is particularly beautiful - with elegantly decaying old buildings, a lovely produce market and some great street food stalls. Hoi An is famous for a number of local specialities, which obviously we didn’t hesitate to try out - I became a big fan of the chicken wonton, and the others fell in love with a ‘roll your own pancake’ dish - rice flour pancakes, omelette, prawns, greenery and a hot & spicy sauce.
Hoi An also introduced us to the concept of Fresh Beer. In Vietnam, as well as the bottled beers, plenty of ‘Bier Hoi’ bars exist: these places brew a vat of beer each day, and it all has to be sold within 24 hours. They sell the beer at 16p per glass. Well, it would have been rude not to try it, and we were enjoying a Vietnamese cultural experience.
Slightly less classically Vietnamese was King Kong Bar’s ‘free rum & coke between 10 & 11’ promotion. But we like to enjoy a cultural mix. King Kong Bar is a dive. Seriously - it’s basically a concrete room, with a pool table in the middle, with graffiti all over the wall - but somehow it works. We mistakenly arrived there early - and we were literally the only ones in there - until 2 minutes to 10, when suddenly 400,000 Australians appeared (or so it seemed)
I especially had a great time on the second night, when Roxane & I created an ‘Hoi An emergency’ play list on my ipod and we got that playing for an hour or so - it was great to be dancing on the pool table, knowing that each next song was going to be a great one, cos we’d chosen it (far better than the diabolical Swedish euro-pop of the night before)
I really loved Hoi An - it was the first place in Vietnam that I could really feel a pull for - a beautiful small town with a slower pace of life and friendly people.
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