This visit to Cambodia was very different to the last. This time I was on an Intrepid Real Food tour, and I got to visit a bunch of different places around the country.
Tag Archives: hoi an
Happy Hoi An
(Posted retrospectively) We love visiting Hoi An. This is the fourth time and it’s not lost its shine, although every time we visit there is more development and bigger resorts and hotels. I’m glad it’s bringing money into the town.
Since R was leaving after three days so he could go back to work, we started our tailor stops with his requests, starting at Bebe. Since we were staying on the east side of town this time. we stopped at the flagship Bebe shopfront, which was very busy and businesslike. R ordered his items, but I didn’t really feel the joy so left it until the next visit.
Continue readingFiled under Vietnam
A Return to Hoi An (and much shopping)
It was a long travel day between Sapa and eventually reaching our hotel in Hoi An. Next time, I’d recommend a night in Hanoi in between, rather than mixing the 6 hour hilly drive plus a flight.
Hoi An is an old favourite of ours, gorgeous and seemingly the whole town is focused on food, massages and custom-made clothes. A pretty good focus, and we pretty much stayed within this purview!
Continue readingFiled under Vietnam
Vietnam – Hoi An
Japanese Covered Bridge… with all the other tourists
As we drove through Danang from the airport towards Hoi An, we were pretty amazed to see a lot of development, especially along the beach. There are a startling number of new resorts in varying stages of completion along there, and the Danang airport also has a brand new international terminal since we were last here in 2014. Wow!
Da Nang isn’t the only place to be developing – as we drove in, we saw Hoi An is growing quickly too, and the sleepy town we’d visited is now much bigger too. One night we walked along Cua Dai where we’d stayed last time, and we were shocked to see that almost all the places we’d eaten at (and the cheap beer places, too) had been replaced by more new hotels and electronics shops. The little Pho place next to that hotel was still there, but it looked like only just!
Filed under Vietnam
Hoi An to Saigon
4am: wake up to get ready for early flight to HCMC
4.05am: realise my tummy is still feeling unhappy after something I ate last night
5am: start bumpy bus trip to Da Nang airport
Good start to the day! After an unhappy flight (I asked the Jetstar attendant for some water just before takeoff and burst into tears at her when she asked me to pay for it, as my wallet was in the roof rack and it was all too hard) we did eventually get to HCMC without mishap.
Reunification Palace
En route from the airport to the hotel, we stopped at a couple of the big sights for a quick photo op – the others were all very understanding of my fragility and made it snappy (hur hur 🙂 )
Outside the post office, looking a little wan
Notre Dame
The hotel let me check in early, and I retired gracefully (relatively) to chew quick-eze and try to sleep my nausea away, while the others headed to the War Museum and the Cu Chi tunnels. And apparently had a go at shooting various Vietnam War-era guns!
By mid-afternoon I felt human enough to attempt lunch, so I ordered what sounded like a lovely bland meal from room service – steamed tofu and mushrooms, and a side of steamed rice. Unfortunately what the menu didn’t mention that it came with a really tasty satay sauce with chilli! I did taste a tiny bit before isolating the blander elements, and it was really good.
The food was what I needed, and restored to health, I had a quiet couple of hours pottering around the hotel doing washing and organising my many purchases from Hoi An.
We tried to have dinner at a local beer hall, but decided to go elsewhere – the music was loud and they turned it louder despite our requests to lower it, the food was expensive and the killer — they had no cold beer! So we headed across the park to a place T recommended which offers some local specialities.
Rice pancake
After a delicious entree of rice pancakes (which were like poached egg-shaped cakes of rice batter with prawns and pork on the top, which you ate wrapped up in lettuce leaf with some herbs, and dipped into the usual dipping sauce of lime, fish sauce and herbs) R had the pork tongue, and I asked for the snails, but apparently they’d run out. I swapped to crab vermicilli in a clay pot, after being assured that yes, they were in possession of crab, vermicilli and a clay pot 🙂
P’s Pineapple Fried Rice
The standout meals were those served in fruit! P had pineapple fried rice, which arrived in a pineapple! T and T both ordered the prawns steamed in coconut juice, so they were presented in a coconut shell!
We head out to the homestay on the Delta tomorrow, so we decided on an early night.
Filed under Vietnam
Hoi An Day 3
Ahhhh free day!
We celebrated by waking up a little later and meandering our way down to breakfast. Then we scheduled in a massage down the street at the Pansee Spa to ease our aching and stiff muscles from yesterday’s bicycle extravaganza. Oh, and my sunburnt arms are now back to normal, if anyone was worried!
After the massage, we had our very important trip to Yaly tailors again to have our final fitting. The clothes are awesome – R looks fabulous in his suit and 20,000 shirts, and my dresses look pretty damn cool too, especially the leopard print silk. Yum! (but which sense of the word?? Tasty, or feeling a bit sexy?? Both of course!) I may have ordered another shirt dress in a purple and cream print (obviously feeling shopper’s remorse) and almost another silk dress in a gorgeous watercolour green and cream silk crepe… but I managed to hold back. They said everything could be delivered later tonight, along with an extra shirt I ordered up for Mum. After all, it’s Mothers’ Day 🙂
All the design catalogues at Yaly
Since it was getting pretty hot again, we wandered back to the hotel to hang out in the bar for a bit with the others. We stopped past the place for R’s shorts, but they weren’t ready, so we asked them to drop them at the hotel whenever they were finished. Lunch was a very pleasant affair, with Mee Goreng and the traditional mojito…
Unfortunately the pool was closed today; something to do with pipes I think. We were informed about it over breakfast, and when expressed our sadness, the returned line from “Friendly” (seriously, that’s what her name badge said) was “Thank you for your sympathy”. Very sad!
Sunset from the hotel
The tailors eventually dropped off R’s shorts at reception, and when we collected them, it seems they have got their revenge at us not being convinced to pay more, by using a polyester fabric for them, rather than the cotton we had chosen! (The story was that they gave a price, then went back and tried to charge more, but we refused.) Plus they are too big and fall off R’s hips. Luckily, I have a bit more of a curve there, so I will be able to appropriate them for myself! Glad I bought him that gift 😀 Moral to the story: don’t go to Vu Thu tailors; stick with the more expensive but incredibly reliable Yaly! The girls we had help us were Cynthia and Marina – ask for them, as they said they get a bonus if they get good feedback from clients, and they definitely did a good job with us.
Beer hall
We popped out with the crew to the beer hall (beer shack?) for a quick one before dinner. This place seems to be the only place nearby which has the fresh beer, plus it’s really cheap, so it was popular with us, as well as a lot of others! We’ve popped in so many times that the staff know we like the table out the front, and tonight when that table was full, they moved all the motorbikes from in front of the next place so we could sit there instead!
Beer hoi
Dinner was at another “local” place, which happened to be full of tourists chanting “Moat, Hai, Ba… Yo!” to toast as their tour leader had taught them. It was good fun though, a place where we assembled our own spring rolls from rice paper, skewered pork, boiled vegies, lettuce and herb leaves, and small fried spring rolls, then dipped into a soy/sesame dipping sauce. Vry tasty, but I was sitting near the deep fryer and an hour of breathing in the oil fumes and I wasn’t feeling too great. (I’m sure it had *nothing* to do with the mojito… or maybe it was a combination of the two). In any case, I was very happy to hop into a taxi and head back to the hotel, coincidentally making it back early for our appointment with the optometrist.
Wrap and Roll
Tasty!
However, shopping fail. Even though they say “everything is possible in Hoi An”, it was evidently impossible to make a pair of glasses for an extremely short sighted gal in 24 hours, even though he managed to make R’s. Ah well, I’ll see what Saigon can offer.
I also had delivery of the silver jewellery (including an earring for R, so at least one of the pressies I got him works!) and the Yaly clothes. Woohoo! Shopping win!
Relatively early night – ish, because we have a very very early bus to the airport for our quick flight to HCMC.
Hoi An Day 2
I want to ride my bicycle…
Today dawned horribly hot and sticky — even hotter than yesterday! Usually I cope okay with temperatures in the high 30s, but not when it’s 60% humidity as well… not great. More fun – we had a bicycle tour scheduled today, which in itself was fine (flat countryside meant easy pedalling, and pedalling meant breeze!) but standing around in 40C humidity while we had talks about various different aspects of farm life wasn’t conducive to happy feelings! Plus the bicycles hadn’t seen any maintenance for a long time and so the gears wouldn’t change, and if you tried, the chain fell off the bike.
Herb gardens
Even though this bit wasn’t great, the countryside was actually pretty amazing, and we saw how to grow mung bean sprouts, how to make rice noodles, how they grow all the fabulous herbs to use in the fresh and tasty dishes we’d been eating. It just would have been good to have some shade.
Harvesting mung bean sprouts
The next section of the day was much less gruelling – a cooking class at the Morning Glory restaurant. Ms Vy started with fresh spring rolls, went on to demonstrate Cau Lau (pork and noodles with vegies), crispy rice pancake and rice dumplings. We then finished up with delicious icecreams (I chose lemongrass and coconut – yum!) and candied coconut and ginger pieces.
Making spring rolls
Ms Vy was interesting and articulate, and we all appreciated the airconditioning and copious amounts of cold water provided (and being able to sit down while cooking!) I’d highly recommend doing a class at Morning Glory; it’s interesting, well-organised, and airconditioned! 😉
Eating rice dumplings
Speaking of “yum”, that word in Vietnamese apparently means something dodgy (according to Professor Google, either blowjob, feeling lustful, or farting. Nice.) so we all tried really hard to not say it. Of course, as soon as it’s taboo…
Cao Lau
After our delicious lunch, we scooted down to Yaly again for fittings. Mine needed quite a bit of work still, but they’re looking good (or as good as a sticky, sweaty woman sporting some enviable sunburn can look) so I’m really looking forward to tomorrow when I can pick them up!
We also had a shoe fitting, and they’re pretty good too! I picked up my tourist pants – fabulous – and ordered some shorts for R, and also managed to squeeze the CC a bit more at the jewellery shop, buying a couple of charms for my charm bracelet, and replacing a silver chain that had snapped a couple of months ago. One of the guys, T, had had some glasses made up really cheaply, and I had a bit of shopper’s envy, so we wandered downtown at dinner time, but the “recommended” shop was shut. There was another one further down the street which was open, and so after astounding the optometrist with how short-sighted I am, we picked out a pair of frames to be made up in the next 24 hours before we leave. Cross fingers!
Local Pho
Then dinner – we couldn’t track down the rest of the group who we’d vaguely posited to meet at the beer hall, so we decided to have a bowl of Pho at the place next door. Can’t really go past a $1.50 dinner, especially when it’s so tasty! (or is that so YUM? 😉 )
Hue to Hoi An
We headed out on the bus just after breakfast, so with a couple of stops on the way we were aiming to reach Hoi An by early afternoon.
Pass over the mountain
The passes over the mountains were a bit hairy in places, with the occasional hairpin turn! The drivers seem to take things a bit more carefully through these sections, thank goodness.
Pass
We stopped at a roadside stall selling distilled oil from some kind of tree that smelled a bit eucalyptus-y, which T told us was used as a cure-all kind of ointment when Tiger Balm was too strong.
Part of China Beach
The first proper stop was on part of what used to be called China Beach, where we paddled and relaxed for a bit on the beach. We also stopped at another section of beach in Da Nang, before popping into a bakery for lunch. Not much gluten free there (of course), but I’d been warned, so I’d grabbed some chips at the previous stop. T did say that one of the cakes was just made from rice, so I tried it, but the old tum wasn’t too happy later on, so I think it might not have been entirely correct. I resolved to not take the chance next time!
After reaching our hotel in Hoi An, the Phu Thinh “boutique” hotel, we all rejoiced in the aircon before heading back out for a tour of the town. Shopping is really the raison d’être for Hoi An – mainly tailors, but also cheap imported tourist tat clothes, quick-turnaround spectacles, jewellers, custom shoe makers, and the list goes on…
Markets
T showed us a couple of “recommended” places, and then left us to our own devices in Yaly, the best tailor company is Hoi An. Dangerous, dangerous place. I ordered three dresses (one linen shirt-dress, one cotton print dress and one silk chiffon maxi – delicious!), plus had a couple of tops copied for Mum, and R went to town on a suit and various shirts.
While on our way back to the hotel, clutching the smoking Visa card, we passed a place making those zip-off convertible trousers, which I’d always damned as “screams ‘tourist'”. These were black with flashes of red on the pocket, so I buckled under and ordered a pair. Then I saw twenty other shops with the same thing! Oh well…
We also got distracted into a shoe shop, Kim Anh, which copied shoes from pictures etc. R bought a parti-coloured pair of Converse-style hi-tops and some dress shoes, and I ordered some teal sandals and a pair of green with yellow piping Mary Janes, and a green handbag. The shoulder straps are even long enough, because they were made to fit!
While we were in there looking at the leather goods, the guy from the place I’d ordered the pants from came rushing in to check that charcoal grey was okay for the pants, as they didn’t have black. Amazing that he found us!
Visa card fainting under the pressure, we headed back to the hotel just in time to meet up with the gang for dinner. We were going to a “family” restaurant which an ex-chef had opened up in his home, to try some local specialties.
Tomato and fish soup
Dinner was fantastic, especially when washed down with a mojito or three. We had a tomato and fish soup to start, king prawns with a cumquat sauce, gummy shark with stir-fried morning glory (water spinach) and roasted pork rib. There was a bit of unpleasantness at the end when they couldn’t work out who hadn’t paid for one of the drinks ($3), which seemed a bit rich since they were the ones keeping track, plus they got a significant tip from the group at the end.
The whole tipping thing here is a bit weird. Everywhere we’ve read says that Vietnam is not a tipping culture, and not to tip unless for really amazing service, but T enforces tipping wherever we are. The taxi drivers here expect so much of a tip that they don’t even bother trying to give change, and just drive off without offering the change which was a quarter of the amount paid! A bit cheeky.
Two Weeks Away 