Hoi An – October 28

Hoi An was the third stop on our Vietnam tour. Hoi An is a town of about 100,000 people on the coast in the middle of the country. To get there, we flew Vietnam Airlines (!) from Hanoi to Da Nang and then took a 30-minute taxi ride to Hoi An.

Hoi An’s major tourist attraction are the many older (mid-1800s) wooden houses and stone buildings that somehow survived the wars. There are also a number of Chinese “meeting houses” that look like pagodas.

The homes have been designated as a World Heritage site by UNESCO and the money you spend to buy a ticket goes to their maintenance and, you hope, the family. The houses are interesting because they have multiple cultural influences – Vietnamese, French, and Chinese. Most of the homes are still private residences, but some are open to tourists, with the tour usually given by someone who either still lives in the house or whose parents did. We went to a few and the layouts were similar – all on one floor, living rooms and bedrooms in the front, then an open courtyard in the middle, and then the kitchen in the back.

On our second day there, we rented bicycles and rode out to the beach – only a few miles out of town. It was too windy to swim but we at least got to put our feet in the South China Sea. On the way back, we stopped at a little café along the river for lunch. The food was good, but the setting was wonderful – overlooking a bend in the river, with rice paddies in the distance. While we were eating, two people came paddling by, casting a net into the river to catch fish. It seemed so “old” to see people still fishing that way.

Vietnamese food is pretty straightforward – pork, chicken and fish, noodles or rice, and vegetables – but somehow it seems lighter and fresher than the Vietnamese food we get in the US. Hoi An is famous for cao lau – wheat noodles, meat, and vegetables in broth. According to the guidebook, the “correct” way to make the dish is to use water for a specific well – the Bale Well, which we stumbled upon while looking for something else and there was in fact a fellow there filling up plastic jugs with water from the well. Not sure if he was going to make cao lau, but it was odd to see someone filling up jugs from a well in 2010. Hoi An is also famous for “banh vac” – which translates to white rose – and is steamed shrimp in rice dumplings. I didn’t have either one, but we did have some memorable meals in Hoi An – a good lunch at the Morning Glory Restaurant, a good dinner at Green Mango and a really good dinner at Brother’s Café, along the banks of the river. I think I had fried morning glory in every city we went to in Vietnam, but I have to say that the best fried morning glory I’ve had is served right here at CentrePoint in Bangkok.