Hoi An

What a remarkable town.

Hoi An is an old harbour town at the south end of a 50-km-long stretch of white sand that extends south from De Nang and became known by a recent group of imperialists as China Beach. We are still a little too far north for it to be considered beach weather, but the aforementioned 50km stretch clearly has it's season and there are clearly plans for future seasons as well, but more on that later.

For now, we are in Hoi An - a harbor town that apparently had the stunning good luck to lose it's harbour to situation before in industrialization. It therefore avoided the worst ravages of the various wars that we have already cover to too much depth here. Because of this, there is a human scale to the old harbour front, and with tourists the main source of import income, there is a feeling here not unlike Victoria or any "fisherman's wharf" development you might visit in any reclaimed harbour town...

...except with a kick-ass market.

This feeling is vastly improved by the closure of much of the harbour area to motorized vehicles during most of the day. Pedestrians and cyclists rule the area, and there are countless small restaurant fronts where you can have a coffee (yeah, the Vietnamese know their coffee, and it is really good more often than it is really bad) or a beer and watch the world go by.

At night, the rivers and walkways and pedestrian bridges light up with lanterns and LEDs, and the scent of street food fills the air.

The sights in Hoi An are historic, and UNESCO protected sites include many family homes that have become shrines to the ancestors or benevolent societies that built them, sometimes more than 300 years ago.

It seems the frequency of floodwater has increased in recent years, but the homes built a few meters from the river seem to survive, with their relics intact.

Hoi An also gave us a chance to rent a couple of local bikes and head out to the nearby beach - the far southern end of a long stretch of white sand. This involved a leisurely ride through the countryside, small villages, and ubiquitous rice paddies (Vietnam is the world's second largest rice producer - so you are never far from a paddy).

At the beach, the weather was cloudy, and the sea was rough, which might have been good for the local fisherman, but not so good for a hopeful beach bunny.

 

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