GOOD MORNING VIETNAM IN HOI AN
Since Vietnam is a very long and thin country, most travelers either start at the top in Hanoi and travel down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), or vice versa. We decided to break this tradition and skip Northern Vietnam for now due to the limited time we have and start right in the middle, then travel South. We heard great things about Hoi An from fellow travelers, so we decided to make that our first stop, and it gave us such a great impression of the country, we just didn’t want to leave!
It seemed to have everything we could wish for: the people were genuinely friendly and very helpful, the food was amazing and cheap (and we finally felt like we could safely eat anything that was served to us!), the weather was warm and there was a pretty beach just outside town! The old city has a fabulous vibe with narrow streets covered by trees, old traditional building, pagodas, many cafes and the river flowing through it. We agreed that it is a perfect backpacker destination, with plenty of activities, which we, of course, gave a try: high quality cooking courses, renting a scooter to visit the countryside and the famous Marble Mountain and also some shopping.
The Perfect Fit
My good readers will probably know that I’m not a particularly enthusiastic shopper, but even I was impressed by the opportunities – Hoi An must be one of the tailor-made capitals of the world! Basically, if you have a picture of a suit / dress, shoe or bag that you like, the tailors can make it for you– from good quality materials, to your perfect fit – for a fraction of its cost in Western Europe. It was amazing to see how quickly they did all this: as soon as you had agreed with the designer what you wanted, she explained it to the messenger waiting outside the shop with a motorbike who sped off with the instructions (and the clothes that needed to be modified) to the nearby factory. The clothes were ready to be tried on the next day (although you need to allow for 2-3 fittings and days in the cases of clothes, so they can be adjusted, it’s normal that they don’t fit perfectly at the first try). As you can probably gather, we both succumbed to the temptation and decided to refresh our work wardrobe. After some hard bargaining, we managed to get 25 pieces of clothing between the two of us, all for the price of two non-tailored suits back home in London, or roughly £650:
Me: 2 suits (with an extra pair of trousers, ties and hanky for each), 6 shirts and a pair of jeans
Renata: a suit, 3 dresses, 2 skirts, 3 tops, 1 blaiser and a pair of jeans
The city has nearly 200 tailors all of whom have good reviews, so it was difficult to choose, but based on some recommendations we decided with Bill Ben tailors, and we were amazed at the expertise, attention to detail and quality of service, we would absolutely recommend them. It was a very unique experience to sit with palettes of fabrics of different quality and colours and the pictures of the clothes we wanted, and trying to decide together with the designer which one should be used for each piece of clothes. Once we made our order in the afternoon, the day after we could go for the first fit, where many of the clothes were already perfect fit for the first time.
Once seeing the expertise and the speed of service at the tailor`s we also made some hand-made leather handbag, wallet and shoes for Renata, all delivered within a couple of days with excellent quality! We could choose from hundreds of leather samples of buffaloes and cows and learnt the differences between the two. Apart from clothes, shoes and bags, many people get leather coats, occasional dresses, silk clothes. Since our backpacks didn’t have enough spare room for this much extra clothes, we could even ship all the stuff to a friend’s friend in Australia. The only thing we now have to pay attention to is not to gain or lose any weight, or the clothes won’t fit!
A Taste of the Cream of Vietnam
The next must try was a Vietnamese cooking course in Hoi An, the mecca of culinary schools, most of which have amazing reviews from fellow travelers! As part of the half a day course we visited the lively local market to learn how to select the best ingredients, and then we took a boat to get to the location of the course in a bamboo house standing on stilts on the river with a coconut forest around. The course was located in a small village which we approached via a half-hour cruise followed by a short trip in a traditional round boat made out of coconut leaves, where our captain showed us some of the other creative things you can make out of this versatile material, like crowns, jewelry and toys for kids.
Market tour:
Boat trip to the cooking school:
Vietnamese cuisine is focused around fresh ingredients and has a few twists on the usual SE Asian food. The delicious spring rolls for example are not fried in oil, but are wrapped in crispy rice paper and served fresh to make sure none of the flavours are lost. Some of our other favourites included:
Banh my – a sandwich usually prepared with scrambled eggs, pork pate or chicken. The twist is that it is a deliciously fresh mini-baguette – the unexpected legacy of the country’s French colonial past. Great for breakfast or lunch.
Pho – a noodle soup with beef stock and plenty of vegetables, similar in concept to Japanese ramen, but more to our liking, It exists with pork, chicken or even seafood.
Banh xeo – a crispy pancake with seafood or meat and vegetables, eaten as a snack with sauces
White rose – this is a Hoi An specialty, and is somewhat similar to dumplings, it`s filled with a mixture of pork, shrimps and vegetables but it`s shaped like a rose, and I liked the extra bang that the sautéed onions on top gave
At the course we learned about the intricacies of the ‘morning glory’ vegetable (also called the Vietnamese water spinach), how to make fresh (i.e. not fried) spring rolls, banana flower salad, Vietnamese pork BBQ and cao lao noodles just to name a few. Part of the activity was for us to spend some time fishing and see what we could catch. I felt very lucky having caught 2 very sizable fish, much more impressive than the minnows the other people in our group managed to produce – this feeling was only slightly diminished by my knowledge that I was fishing in a fish-pond, only slightly better than doing so in an aquarium!
In general, at the course we used a lot of rice noodles or rice noodle paper, fresh vegetables, fresh herbs (like mint, or Vietnamese mint which is different from the ordinary one, Thai basil etc.), sautéed onions and peanuts on the top of dishes. Food often has a little spicy chilli sauce to go with, and we also used some of the common Asian food ingredients, fish sauce and oyster sauce.
I also had a field day with all the fresh seafood – since squid and shrimp cost the same as chicken I was finally able to indulge in this area. The most surprising thing about the restaurants in Hoi An, is that there were so many good ones – the best 50 restaurants all had excellent reviews, so you could easily drop in anywhere in the city and be reasonably confident of having a great meal and a good price. Indeed, Vietnam has been the best value for money place we have visited in our trip so far: as long as you stay away from the resorts, £10 will get you a really nice room with breakfast for two, while a local meal for two with fresh juice can be had for £5 at a normal place, but would cost £8 on the beachfront.
Talking about accommodation, we would also recommend the Jolie Villa Homestay – it’s a bit far on foot from the centre, but they give you free bicycles and the room and staff are amazing. You can also use the swimming pool of their sister hotel and their breakfast pancakes are to die for!
Alternative Full Moon Party
The lunar calendar still has a big importance in Vietnam, like a lot of Eastern cultures, and Tet (the lunar new year, which falls in January-February each year) is the biggest celebration of the year. While we obviously missed the big one, we were still able to see the smaller party that is thrown for every full moon. This month was doubly special, as it fell on the day prior to the Buddha’s 2579th birthday, and in the evening the city centre was fully decorated with colourful lanterns and people set lanterns to float on the river. Not as raucous as the Full Moon Party in Koh Phangan, Thailand, but a very nice sight and a great experience nonetheless!
Motorbikes, Massages and Mango Juice on the Beach
There are plenty of other activities to wile away your days in between tailor fittings if you so choose. We decided to relieve the stress from the non-stop eating by going to a massage at one of the salons, again, roughly the first 50 with only excellent reviews! We went to the White Rose, a spa of amazing quality at fantastic prices, which was on our way to the hostel. They were very happy that we were their first guests of the evening (tradition holds that the first guest of the day will bring the establishment luck and additional customers) and we got an amazing 90-minute massage for £15 each - after a complimentary feet bath with lemon and herbs to help us relax, some nice ginger tea and a shower!
A nice day trip in the area is to rent a motorbike and explore the countryside with its local villages, and stop by the famous Marble Mountains. There are 5 smallish mountains made out of marble in the middle of a huge flat plain. It’s a bit commercial at the bottom of the mountain, with huge marble Buddha and Madonna statues for sale, but the marble caves on top are very pretty and a welcome relief from the oppressing heat. Now that we had lightened our load by sending the things from our backpack that we would no longer need ahead to Australia, I really wanted to buy a 10-tonne Buddha statue, but Renata spoiled my fun by insisting we didn’t have enough space in our backpacks. L
The last time we were on a beach to relax was in Colombia in early March (the weather in Japan was rather too chilly for sunbathing), so we were delighted by the stretch of sand just outside the city. The beachfront was lined with restaurants offering free beds and umbrellas if you had lunch with them afterwards. Offering something free in the hope (or expectation) that you buy something from them seems to be quite common in Vietnam – parking your motorcycle can be free if you spend 30 seconds browsing a marble-ware shop or buy a litre of water, which is an interesting concept. It`s a long-stretching golden sandy beach with coconut umbrellas and a nice breeze. There are accommodations on the beach side as well, so many people spend a few nights there and then some in the town too. For us, simply, after moving so many times in the last few months from place to place we were happy to finally stay at one place for a longer time and take the 10-minute motorbike ride to the beach over a picturesque countryside landscape with water buffaloes, waterlily ponds and the river with fishing boats.
Scenic Railroad to Hue
After having an amazing time in Hoi An (indeed, we had already extended it at the cost of skipping Hue, the old imperial city), it was time to move on to our next destination. On impulse, and before we knew how much we would like Hoi An, we had bought a cheap flight ticket to our next destination, Dalat (the Easy Rider capital of Vietnam). We seriously considered missing the flight for taking a few more nights at this amazing place, but taking a 19-hour bus trip instead didn’t appeal, and we felt we could always spend more beach time at another location later on (by this time we felt we were quite tired from being on the move constantly, so some R&R was sorely needed). So we packed our bags and checked out our final destination in Central Vietnam, the rail journey from Danang to Hue from where our flight was. This rail journey is said to be the most scenic in Vietnam, as it winds along the coastal hillsides offering a bird’s eye-view of the beaches below. Word of warning to fellow travellers though: don’t show up at the train station expecting to buy a last minute ticket and hop on the departing train, since we had to wait 50 minutes at the ticket office. Either get someone with a Vietnamese credit card to book your tickets online, or be prepared for a long wait.
In our next blog we`ll reveal the adventures behind two Vietnamese easyrider motorbike drivers on the road for 2 days, the way we chose to discover the Central Highlands!