The bus is seriously swish. Comfortable seats, tv screens in the headrests with a good selection of films and air conditioning. There is even a hostess who comes around on a regular basis with drinks, snacks and even a meal at lunchtime. The journey takes 6 hours, although the traffic was bad so it took 7 hours.
Arriving in Bangkok, I took the sky train and then the line out towards the airport. My hotel is 3km from the airport and it was excellent. I had a huge room with all the facilities and it was opposite a vibrant night market with a great choice of food stalls. I had morning glory, stir fried with pork and served with rice.
Up early and at the airport, I find myself with 2 hours to wait, as everything went so smoothly. The plane is a bit basic, not a patch on the bus. I thought it looked a bit empty and then I realised why. The seats are quite a bit further apart than in Europe, clearly they don’t believe that you should have to be a sardine, unlike most european airlines.
Hello Vietnam.. It’s a bit colder than Thailand, but still a reasonable 23 degrees. The queue for immigration was quite long and I’m about to find out if having no visa is going to be a problem. You don’t need a visa if you are only staying up to 15 days, but they can be funny about it. In the end it was easy and they didn’t even ask for my return ticket. They just gave me a 15 day entry stamp and waved me through.
I am now officially a Dong millionaire. Indeed I’m worth quite a few million, thanks to their currency which is nearly 30,000 to £1. It’s difficult to shut my wallet!
I took a taxi to The Motorbike Store, run by Mr Lee, a really friendly and knowledgeable chap. The motorbike I hire here will first of all take me south to Hoi An, before I turn north again crossing the Hai Van pass (made famous in the Top Gear Special). There will be various other stops along the way before I arrive in Hanoi after 5 or 6 days on the road and meet up with my daughter, Danika.
Despite Vietnam being a more authoritarian state than Thailand, although the check points etc have made me wonder about that, the mask wearing here is much less. Perhaps 30 percent wear them. So it is fairly clear that the Thai government did a number on their population.
I’m back to driving on the other side of the road again, but I’m not sure that it makes a lot of difference here. It’s mayhem. Traffic lights appear largely optional and bikes come at you from every angle and direction, weaving in and around anything and everything. You have to concentrate 100% constantly while driving, auto pilot is not an option if you want to arrive unscathed. Rule 1, if something is bigger than you it always has the right of way. Rule 2, there are no rules. The horn is the general indication that another vehicle is near you. Bangkok was bad, here is worse and I’m not even in Hanoi yet, but it’s great fun !
I’m staying in Hoi An for a coupe of nights and I have to say it’s a great place. The old town is very old and has lots of interesting ancient houses, assembly halls and the odd temple. There is a fair amount of Chinese and Japanese influence in the old buildings due to the huge amount of trade and trading posts set up between the countries in previous centuries.
Where do I start with Hoi An, there is much to see and do here. There are two markets, one during the day, which is mostly food based and the night market which is mostly souvenir type stuff. There are numerous and I mean numerous tailors here who can whip you up suits, shirts or dresses in a day. There are many leather shops as well and some fantastic shoes. I wish I had an empty rucksack to put it all in.
I did buy a couple of items, both the same, but with different designs on them. Interestingly the first one I bought at the night market in Hoi An, which is very touristy. When I asked the price I was told 250,000 dong, I seen them earlier in the town for 125,000, so I knew it was over the top. I said no thanks and he dropped to 150,000. It was still more than the other place, where I hadn’t even started negotiating. He then dropped to 100,000 and seeing I was still walking away he offered 80,000, so I bought it, thinking I had a good deal. The next day I was in a village 4km away and saw they had the same bags or very similar and when asking the price I was told 40,000, before even negotiating, so I bought another one. I wish I waited and bought both there.
There are loads of bars and restaurants all over the old town, which are decked out in colourful lanterns. All around the river, which has lots of boats that you can ride in, are also colourful lanterns. The effect is really beautiful. Very romantic as well apart from the street hawkers. They really do try to get you buy at every shop and invite you in to every restaurant and massage parlour. Massages are more expensive than Thailand on the face of it, but you can negotiate and there is often a happy hour price. Negotiating here is a must and the sellers seem to revel in it.
The island in the old town is traffic free and you have to leave your motorbike outside and walk across the bridge. I tried some Cao lao, which is a famous dish from here, but more of that later and also some Banh Mi, which is a baguette. However it is filled with wonderful Vietnamese flavours. It’s really tasty and I’ve had a couple of them already.
I really love Hoi An, I could spend a lot more time here, so I decided to make the most of my last day and do quite a few things. I rode off to the coconut village, which is a bit touristy now, but a great trip none the less.
Once there you have to go out on a round coconut boat. It’s not expensive, I paid 100,000 dong for 45 minutes and my boat skipper was excellent, he took photos and had me driving the boat. That went on so long that I joked that I was doing his job for him and perhaps he should be paying me! There is quite a knack to getting a round boat going straight forwards. You have to paddle in a figure of eight movement while also pulling the paddle towards you. I got the hang of it as you’ll see from the video, if I post it up at some point. We went down tiny little streams, thick with palm trees and coconuts and tried some fishing in little corners. We could see the fish biting and pulling the line under the water, but didn’t manage to pull one out. In another part of the river I saw some of the drivers spinning round and round in the little circular boats, like being on a waltzer (my favourite fairground ride). You could hop into their boat from yours and go for a spin, for a fee of course.
Once back in Hoi An, I bought a ticket that allows you entry to 5 of the historic sites around town. There are quite a few more than 5, but the receptionist at my hotel recommended the best 5 to me. It’s only 60,000 dong for the ticket, so you could always buy another one if you wanted.
After the afternoon wandering around town and stopping for a quick 45 minute massage as it was massage happy hour, I headed back to the hotel to meet my food guide.
I’m off on a culinary exploration of Hoi An and to taste some local dishes and hear about their history. Bao my guide is waiting for me and we head off to our first stop. He speaks good english, which is useful as my Vietnamese is non-existant. However I’m sure it would be easier to learn than Thai is. For a start they use our alphabet. There are some extra bits sticking out of some letters, but in general I can have a stab at reading and pronouncing something I see and get very close. In Thailand you have precisely zero chance as their writing is just squiggles. It’s frustrating that after 2 days in Vietnam I can already read and recognise things, menu items and drinks for example, whereas in Thailand nothing at all. Although I do have a vocabulary of at least 80 Thai words and phrases now, but I’ve learnt them as a baby learns and would not recognise them written down.
Our first stop was at a little local restaurant. You wouldn’t see tourists in these places normally because they wouldn’t know what to order, but Bao is doing the ordering so I’m in luck. He orders Cao Lau, which I tried yesterday, but in a much more touristy restaurant. This one is better than yesterday. The meat is more tender and the flavour more complex. Even so, I think as dish that Hoi An is famed for it’s overrated in my opinion.
The interesting bit is about the noodles they use. They are only made in Hoi An and only half a dozen or so people supply them. The noodle are thick, rather like the Japanese Udon noodles, but then they are washed in a barrel that has ash in (lye). This gives them their distinctive brown colour and slightly crispy texture. They are served in a broth with pieces of pork and greens together with small crispy rice crackers and chilli.
Next up were some pork skewers. This was very interesting, because it was a similar eating process to the Nems (vietnamese spring rolls, rolled in a lettuce leaf with mint and dipped in a spicy sauce) that I love in France and used to eat at the markets in Lille every week.
The pork skewers are called are called Thit Noung and the rice paper Banh Uot. You take a dry piece of rice paper and place is on a square of wet rice paper. Then you lift up the dry rice paper and it will bring a sheet of the wet rice paper with it. Turn it so the wet rice paper is facing up and put your pieces of pork on top together with some mint and finely sliced spring onion. Add chilli to taste and then roll it very tightly and and dip it in the satay(peanut) sauce. Delicious !
As we walked along the road between stops, we chatted about Vietnamese cuisine and the country itself. They don’t have a great love for the Chinese.
Next was a very popular Vietnamese snack called Banh Beo. It is a mini rice pancake topped with shrimp, fried onion and rice cracker served with a dipping sauce.
The last dish was Bahn Canh. Banh means noodles by the way, while canh means soup. This dish has some deep fried rice crackers in an oval shape with an quail egg inside each, beef, greens and rice pancake. It is served dry in the bowl and you put ladles of a light fish sauce over it to create a soup. Don’t forget to add lots of chilli too. Delicious!
I finished up with a smoothie of soursop fruit, but it isn’t sour at all. It was very nice though.
Clearly I didn’t need to go out to dinner tonight so I wandered along the river and the old town and watched a bit more live music.
A fairly early night as tomorrow I start my long journey north, but the weather doesn’t look too good.