When we
asked for tips on where to go in Vietnam, everyone always said “Hoi An” first.
It should be a nice, cozy town with a river and lanterns that light up in the
night. We also heard that it’s the place
for tailor-made clothes in Vietnam. Our original plan was to fly to Hanoi
and come all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) but we are really tired
of changing places all the time. As wonderful it would’ve been to see the
entire country, we decided to stay in three places and in Hoi An for two weeks.
Usually people stay there for 2 - 4 days, so all locals were always surprised
when we told how long we stay in Hoi An.
Hoi An at night
We had decided to stay in some relaxing place and did quite a lot of research online. Then we found Villa Azumi which is a new villa hotel in Hoi An. This is the first place that really made us feel special for our honeymoon and we maybe also because we stayed there for two weeks. When we came, a beautifully set up room waited for us with food and wine, we were given a 20 minute foot massage and we had a free minibar for two weeks. Cool! The hotel area was relaxing and beautiful as well. It was next to rice fields and we could watch local workers harvesting rice during our stay.
In the
beginning of our stay in Hoi An we biked and walked around the old town. It
looks charming with all the lanterns, restaurants and small shops. We also
noticed that every second shop was a tailor shop. How on earth would we know
which tailor to choose? Edda had done some research online and pinned four
different places on the map. We visited all of them first and said to the staff
that we were now just looking what kind of fabrics they would have and decide
later what we order and where. Bao Khanh Silk: this was actually recommended by our hotel and we knew that the “hotel
deals” are such one should not take because the price is higher when the
hotel also gets a cut. But we decided to check that out anyhow. We didn’t tell them
we were sent by our hotel. The service we got was very rude and non-interested.
Very quickly we went out. Then we went to A
Dong Silk which looked very professional. They were very friendly but their
prices were also quite high. Ha-Na:
this one had received many recommendations in different travel blogs so we
decided to check it out. It was very small, not so professional-looking and one
of the staff was eating in the middle of the room where all the clothes were.
Hmm, not the place where I might want to have my clothes lying around. The last
one was Peace tailor purely because
it was number one in TripAdvisor. It was not very big but not the smallest one
either. They seemed nice and the prices were not too high. But they didn’t have
that many fabrics to choose from. Later on, one of our hotel’s staff said she
had also heard that Bebe tailor would
be good. Well, we decided to check that out too. When we went there, all the
sudden we were selecting fabrics and deciding on which items we wanted to
order. We will update you in our next post how everything went. Let's just say that it was good we stayed for 2 weeks there...
Choosing fabrics
Taking measurements
The old
town of Hoi An looks very cute. Many of the streets are pedestrian or bicycle-only
almost entire day. It is filled with tourists but it doesn’t feel too hectic
when everyone is going on a slow pace 😃
When
entering the old town one should buy a ticket that includes entrance for five
different cultural places. Buying the entrance ticket one also helps in
preserving the old town. We visited first the Japanese bridge that was build in
1590s. We also visited Phung Hung ancient house which had architecture from
Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese styles. They had a hole in the floor in
the second floor because every year when its flooding, the furniture from the
first floor is lifted up through it.
Monkeys guarding the entrance of Japanese bridge
An altar for offerings
A hole through which all furniture is lifted during floods
A very common sight in Hoi An. 99% of the people sitting in the bike chairs are Chinese. We even caught some of them sleeping!
Street view in Hoi An
Some buildings we passed buy
During our
stay, we stopped a few times at Cocobox, which has fresh lunch and good drinks.
Edda’s favorite was hot chocolate with chai flavor. Tasted like Christmas. We
were introduced to some new Vietnamese dishes at Orivy which was close to our
hotel. Firstly, the Vietnamese way of filtering coffee was new - see
picture below. Secondly, we tasted a weird-sounding dessert. It had rice,
coconut and green beans in it. It was wrapped in a banana leaf. It tasted weird
at first but then we started to slowly like it.
Lunch at Cocobox
Dinner at Orivy
The weird Vietnamese dessert. Edda cut it in half to see what was inside.
We also found a playful kitten in the restaurant!
Hoi An is
beautiful in the evening. We caught the sunset one evening and the sight is
just lovely.
Okay, this
starts to feel like a food blog but we want to share with you what kind of food
we have had in different countries and if you go to these places, you might
find these useful! So, for non-foodies: sorry - here we go again 😉
We had read
in Lonely Planet that Morning Glory II should be good. We were definitely not disappointed.
The view was nice from their terrace and all our dishes were delicious.
Especially their bak-choy which was pan-fried in clear mushroom sauce and
garlic. Yummy! Another place -- right next door and from the same owner was
Cargo Club. Also, good food and delicious desserts like pavlova and chocolate mousse
cake. Ahh, we had difficulties on choosing our desserts because they have maybe
30 different ones!
View from Morning Glory II's terrace
Delicious bak-choy!
Restaurant street at night
Desserts at Cargo Club - oh, so delicious!
Markus had to change his dessert because the first one had nuts in it. This one was really good too!
The thing
to do in Hoi An is just to walk around in the evening and enjoy all the lights
and lanterns. We also visited the night market where the lantern shops look
very inviting! Beautiful colors! On the side of the river there are people
selling small lanterns that you can put in the river to bring good luck. There are
also people shouting “boat ride, boat ride” to everyone because many take a
boat ride on the river and let the lanterns go there.
Hoi An river at night - isn't it pretty?
Night market
What would
a city be without ice cream? Well, Hoi An definitely has one
very cool place. It’s called Enjoy
and it has over 50 flavors of ice cream. You can find some unusual flavors such
as wasabi, black sesame seed and even beer! But the best part is that you get
to take all ice creams yourself and then you pay by weight. We might’ve had
around 7 - 10 flavors each, when we went there.
We also
visited Museum of Folk Culture that had some old boats and gear that was used
for farming or fishing. Then we found a beautiful photo gallery (Couleurs D’AsieGallery). Réhahn, who is a French photographer, who has traveled around Vietnam
for years and developed relations with locals and taken photos of them. Every
single photo is intriguing and you would want to know more about the person or
landscape in it. The colors are vibrant and he has managed to capture wonderful
facial expressions on film. When we left, the person working in the museum/shop
came to us and said that there is one even bigger exhibition including tribal
outfits. We decided to go and check it out. We stayed there maybe for 1,5 hours
just looking at the photos and tribal outfits from Vietnam. Every outfit had
also a story next to it. It always included the place and amount of tribe
members and then a story of how the photographer gained the tribes trust or how
the outfit is made or how many people in the tribe speak the original language.
This was used for fishing at some point
Beautiful pictures and amazing stories behind the cultural outfits. The place to visit in Hoi An!
Edda’s
friend Heidi was also in Hoi An at the time and she mentioned that there would
be an international fireworks competition in Da Nang on 30 April. So, we rented
a scooter for the evening and headed to Da Nang. Our hotel’s receptionist was worried
that it would be too far away (around 45 minutes) and that we wouldn’t find our scooter in the night
when there are so many people. Heh! Don’t worry - we manage ourselves! We had
heard from one local where the best places would be to see the fireworks. But
maybe the shooting location had changed because we noticed that we (and many
other people) were in the wrong place. There was a statue and a huge boat right
in the way. So we walked to another place to see a bit better. Then we waited
for a long time and wondered whether if there would be any more fireworks. Just
when we thought that we would head back, there came new ones. The fireworks
were nice, but we have seen better even in Finland. We were more impressed
about a color-changing dragon bridge.
Our first location was blocked by some lights, statue (also nice, though) and a boat.
We found this dragon bridge interesting - it changed its color ever now and then
One
evening, on our way back to our hotel, we heard loud music. We noticed that we
had come to some school play or something. Different groups of young children
had their dance shows with pumping music. The shows were actually quite good -
the songs were long and there was plenty of choreography in them! Some of them
were very patriotic, as you can see in the video below.
The music was loud
One day
Markus decided to go to the An Bang beach to check how the kitesurfing
conditions would be. It was about 20 minutes by bike from the hotel. He biked a
bit further away from all the sunbeds and found a nice spot with no-one around.
The beach was good for kiting but the wind was a bit weak. Markus managed to
kite for a while even if he had some problems to stay upwind with the light
wind. He had his toy WOO with him that measures how high he jumps. Even with
the light wind he managed to jump 5,0 meters up.
Since
we were in Hoi An for two weeks, we wanted to see a bit what was around the old
town. We booked a bike tour! We were waiting in the morning at our hotel for
the guide to pick us up but he didn’t show up. Then our receptionist called him
and he had remembered that the tour would be in the afternoon. Well, a little
bit more of waiting and then he came and picked us up. We got our bikes and
sunhats (Markus felt a bit too feminine in it so he decided to use his own cap)
and started to bike around. First we stopped at a Buddhist temple in the city.
There were flags everywhere because buddha’s birthday was coming up. We walked
around the temple and our guide told about the different rooms and buildings
there.
Ready to go!
Then we
biked to a vegetable village where people have their own pieces of ground where
they grow different things. Like ‘siirtolapuutarha’ in Finland, we guess. We also saw people harvesting rice and our guide told that there are fights between people owning the machines because they are really expensive and only a few have one. Those people then try to "rent" their machine for as many as possible and there can be a fight if someone comes to the other's territory. Also, a lot of rice was being dried on the ground and we had to drive often over the rice! For us, that felt really weird. We hope they clean the rice afterwards because everyone drives with scooters, bikes etc. over it! Then
we just biked around in the farmland and saw some cows and water buffalos. We
ended up to a water coconut village where coconut trees grow in the water. Many
people come here for a tour with a traditional round boat that you paddle. Later,
we saw fishing boats and fishing nets and just how people lived around there.
Then we were taken by boat to a restaurant for lunch. The boat ride was great,
especially with the good weather. Our guide fell asleep on the boat and blamed
it on the heat. He said that between 11am and 1pm it’s too hot to do anything. Well,
yes, it was hot but not too hot in our opinion! We noticed that he was feeling
according to what his watch said - not how he actually felt. 😝
Our guide told us that the fishing boats have eyes so that they will see where all the fish are.
We arrived in Triem Tay Bamboo restaurant and cooking class. We had no idea what kind of lunch we
would get. Usually, when we have booked a tour in previous countries, we have
maybe received a sandwich or similar so our hopes were not especially high. But
we got surprised! We got spring rolls, Vietnamese pancakes, noodles and fresh
fruit. Everything was delicious and we couldn’t even eat everything because we
were so full! It was a bit from the town so we would’ve not visited the place
if it wasn’t for the tour, so that was nice.
We will
soon post a second post about Hoi An where you will find info on Marble
mountains, My Son and full moon festival, to name some!
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