Suit You

The old town part of Hoi An in Vietnam is an Unesco World Heritage site and I was looking forward to this for ages. The guidebook says Hoi An old town now charges an entrance fee which is a bit misleading I think. You can certainly walk around the old town for free but there are a handful of buildings you can’t go in unless you have the ticket. We didn’t bother with the ticket to be honest as walking around the town was good enough for me anyway. It says you can imagine the streets and shops haven’t changed in 150 years and that’s probably true. Very picturesque place for sure.

The new town is almost completely dedicated to tailoring. Clothes, shoes, pretty much anything all ready by the next day! Kath, it could be said, was quite excited about this after we met a couple of girls on our Ha Long Bay trip who’d managed to fill their rucksacs and two extra bags each brimming with all manner of clothes and shoes. We did spend most of our time here in taylor shops I have to say.

The market is huge and I even managed to buy the bits needed to coble together a main adapter for my ipod speakers.

Down by the river the floor was litterally covered in tiny shells. I’ve not seen these anywhere else and wondered what on earth it was all about. All was revealed a couple of stall along. A fishy snack. You could buy a bag and cocktail stick and fish the little creatures out. They’re tiny and I guess bag would last quite some time. I wasn’t that adventourous even after my recent raw street squid experience pased without incident but the shells are pretty cool. I collected a load from the beach later. I’m hoping they will stop stinking shortly.

Oh yes, snakes and scorpions seem to love this stuff, there’s at least one of each in almost every bottle. It must be good.

The beach just outside Hoi An which is worth hiring bikes and going to if only for the ride out there. There are some pretty swanky resorts out here too which was a bit unexpected. Walking along the beach we were deluged by people trying to get us to sit at their little plastic tables for drinks. Fine if you want a drink which we did and quite interesting to watch the turf wars between them. A mini world war III broke out while we were sitting there with people drawing lines in the sand and everything! It was a quiet day the hawkers are most persistent I’ve ever seen.