Day 3 -- Hoi An
Back to the airport! Yay!
The barely one-hour flight to Danang was not too taxing (even for Mary and me who were treated to the experience of being loaded like cargo. Handicapped access is interesting in Vietnam). And things really started looking up when we met up with Tuan and Tuan, our guide and driver for the next few days. Tuan the guide is funny, open and gregarious and we were quickly engaged in competitive punning and foodie one-upsmanship.
Much of the drive from Danang to Hoi An is truly hideous, glimpses of China Beach notwithstanding. Danang is big, mostly new and extremely commercial. There’s a colorful amusement park and a bridge built to look like a Chinese dragon in the town center, but the beach has been lined with huge, generic resorts and casinos specifically (and exclusively) built for Chinese and Korean tourists and the word “charmless” is charitable. More interesting were a string of roadside workshops selling marble carvings and statues, the occasional temple, and eventually a landscape of peaceful rice paddies (mostly brown this time of year, but still enormously evocative).
Because you can’t drive into the old city of Hoi An, we stopped at the nearest street corner to our hotel and turned our bags over to an ambitious man with a bicycle rickshaw. One bicycle rickshaw. He managed to get five large bags and four smaller ones onto the thing and in fact beat us to the Vin Hung Heritage House. We felt a little sheepish about the fact that we were the ones greeted with cool towels and orange juice.
Vin Hung is an eccentric hotel -- a 200-year old merchant’s home with an open central courtyard and amazing antique furnishings. It’s spectacularly atmospheric with gorgeous enameled bowls for sinks, elaborate tea sets in each room and windows open to a picturesque back alley with mossy tiles and hanging lanterns. It looks like the set from an old movie, but includes hot breakfast, decent wifi and a free 20-minute foot rub for each guest. (The tub-only/no shower bathing experience is interesting, though.)
We left the peaceful dimness of Vin Hung for the spectacular color and bustle of Hoi An, an old trading town that’s become a tourist magnet for the extravagant lanterns festooning every street, the astonishing variety of fun shops and restaurants and a beautiful riverfront with elaborate bridges and brightly painted boats. The happy chaos is only slightly lessened at 3:00 p.m. when scooters are banished from the streets of the old town. And once the sun sets, waxed cardboard lanterns with votive candles are set floating on the river for anyone willing to pony up a dollar or two. It’s just a riot of color and light and people -- it’s wonderful.
We walked through town to the indoor market where a brisk lady at a busy counter served up delectable white rose dumplings, fried wontons with a sweet tomato sauce and chopped peanuts, and our first big helping of noodles. And beer, of course.
Fueled up, we visited one of the several gorgeous temples in the old town -- another haven of incense, mosaics, koi ponds and bonsai trees. Then on to another ancient merchant’s house, this one with two unique features: an interior wall marked with recent flood levels (including one that’s nearly as high off the ground as Glenn), and a small courtyard where a group of cheerful ladies sitting at a card table surrounded by hanging laundry were making those delectable white rose dumplings by hand.
We checked out the Japanese covered bridge which dates from 1719 and is guarded on one end by carved monkeys and on the other by carved dogs. Inside is a little shrine with burning incense and offerings of flowers. Tuan gave us some useful insight into the difference between temples (for worshipping ancestors or other real people like leaders or saints) and pagodas (for worshiping Buddha). Offerings of flowers, bottled water, liquor, fruit, cigarettes, food and incense are common in both.
We said goodbye to Tuan for the day and after a couple of hours of e-mail checking and cleaning up, met to walk along the riverfront for beers and then dinner at Miss Li’s. This early in the trip we were not as practised at ignoring the hawkers as we got over time, but even with the constant nagging to buy a boat ride or a votive candle or a nifty little light up spinner, the scene by the water was unbelievably wonderful. As was the beer. And the banana flower salad, sauteed morning glory and fish roasted in banana leaves at Miss Li’s.
A NOTE ON BATHROOMS. Over the course of this trip, we experienced many bathrooms, few of them particularly jarring to our American sensibilities. Every single one we visited, though, had a little squirter hose fixed to the wall by the toilet. I sincerely cannot create a mental picture of what one was supposed to do with this hose. If you tried to squirt off your behind with it, you’d send water and whatever you were trying to wash away splashing everywhere. Dave seemed to appreciate this little hose and I’ll let him explain its use if he’s so inclined.
Toilet paper was usually available, but never a given (carry tissues!) and paper towels for hand drying were almost never available (though some places did have air dryers). We did a lot of hand flapping and drying of hands on the seats of pants followed by regular applications of hand sanitizer (probably not really necessary).
Some bathrooms displayed signs (illustrated or not) admonishing one not to put one’s feet on the toilet. (One was memorably worded “Do not place the legs on the toilet.”) Others -- like the bathroom at Miss Li’s -- displayed signs that were the printed equivalent of a shout not to put even toilet paper in the toilet.
Using Miss Li’s bathroom involved walking through the extremely bustling kitchen past huge piles of gorgeously fresh ingredients, sharp knives, open flames and sweating cooks until you reached a worker who acted as a sort of bathroom traffic light, waving people in and out. It was in some ways the highlight of the night.
