Hoi An & Hue

We are sitting outside at a plastic table watching the waves and eating Vietnamese cuisine geared towards tourists. We are the only tourist or eaters at this restaurant and the food is plenty good. A young boy hawking bracelets comes up to our table and like good hawkers anywhere assumes we are interested. I am not at all. Yang is totally. Which is why I guess we are a couple. Yang picks out four bracelets she likes which the hawker assures us is very high quality. He asks for 500,000 VND which my quick math tells me is about $2.50. I barter him down to 300,000 VND and he laughs and tells me that no way using American vernacular for no way. We settle on 400,000 VND. As I get the money out Yang does a quick double take which causes me to do a quick double take. $1 USD is 20,000 VND, not 200,000. Well, at least getting ripped off in Vietnam is cheaper than most places.

This was lunch of our first full day in Vietnam in a town called Hoi An about an hour drive from our five star beach hotel in Da Nang. We rented mopeds for the day ($5) and had found our way to the beach. The weather was not sun bathing ready…high 60ish…and there were few people to be found on the beach. We then headed back into town and was killing a little bit of town on our mopeds waiting for the hotel shuttle to return. Yang then zipped down a small street that was actually a pedestrian street in Hoi An old town. Yells of “no no no” got her to stop. The old town was quite charming, going back to the 17th century, and maintained in the same style. We decided to skip our hotel shuttle back and to had dinner in Hoi An.

While in Hoi An we booked a tourist bus for the next day to the ancient city of Hue. The bus to Hue was filled with young or at least younger than us foreign tourists mostly doing the backpacking thing. We were the only ones on the bus not planning on spending the night in Hue or continuing onto Hanoi. Likely we were also the only ones who didn’t realize it was a 3.5 hour bus ride from Danang. In any case, we got of the bus on some no name street in Hue we went with a hawker who said she could book us a train ticket back to Danang that evening for what worked out to only be a 100% markup (total cost $7).

Our train tickets secured we made our way to the forbidden city of Hue which was modeled very closely after the forbidden city in Beijing. One difference is it is in a much less restored state than the one in Beijing and there are virtually no tourists compared with Beijing.

After the forbidden city we wandered the streets of Hue stopping for coffee, then dinner, then more snacks. Rickshaw (peddle powered) drivers kept asking us if we wanted a ride for $1 an hour. The best thing to do was to keep walking since politely saying “no” gave them permission to follow you for a city block or two repeating their offer.  We got lost on our walk to the train station but still made it in plenty of time for the 7pm departure. The trains were of the old Chinese variety and were faster than the bus, but not by much. Our fellow soft seat passengers were very local except for a couple of tourists. We got back to our hotel at a reasonable time of 10:30pm, tired but a good tired. A good nights sleep with Saigon awaiting in the morning.