Over and over, the friends we’ve made here have been incredibly generous to us, and our trip to Hoi An last week takes the cake. As always, the money our friends spent treating us was negligible to us but quite a lot to them. What we’ve valued even more is the first-hand, authentic experience of life here they’ve made possible for us.
In this case, our main host was a friend who for discretion’s sake I’m going to call Julie. She grew up in Hoi An before coming to Saigon for college. It’s a small city of about 20,000 people, and she and her parents and brother and sister who still live there (with a lot of nieces and nephews) know everybody. Julie arranged to move us smoothly around town meeting with this and that old family friend and seeing the town like a local.
Her parents and siblings were very welcoming. Unfortunately, the plan for us to stay with them fell through, since when they took our passports down to the commune police station to get permission to have overnight guests, it wasn’t granted. We ended up sleeping at a nearby hotel, but only for a few hours each night since we were always up late and up early to spend time with Julie’s family.
Getting there was a breeze on the Vietnam Airlines flight. (About $100 round trip.) It’s about 70 minutes from Saigon to the Da Nang airport, and we never got much altitude so we had a good view of the countryside. From Da Nang (near where China Beach is) we had a hired driver for the 50 km to Hoi An. The coast highway drive was depressing since the beach along the whole route is walled off for ugly tourist resort/ghettoes that all seem to be about one-quarter finished.
We got to Hoi An about 9 a.m. and spent the first morning walking around the old town center. The town is unique in Vietnam for a couple reasons. First, it was a major port for Japanese traders before Japan cut itself off from the outside world in the 1600s. Second, it was untouched by the bombing of WWII, the war with France and the civil war. There was plenty of Chinese and French influence also, but while we walked around, Ilene and I were struck by how similar it felt to old Japanese towns we had been in. In fact, there are probably more genuinely historic Japanese buildings here than we saw in similar sized towns in Japan, since earthquake, fire and the bombing of WWII has destroyed so many there.
Many of the oldest structures serve as homes for the current residents and as open houses for tourists. You have to buy a ticket to enter the town center, and you get four stubs for admission--a la carte--into those houses, handicraft workshops, temples and traditional Chinese meeting houses, which were kind of all-purpose community centers for the Chinese merchants living here. In addition to hitting our allotment of these, we also stopped at other inns and food stalls to sit down and have tea with Julie’s family friends.
After a nap at Julie’s house, she rounded up borrowed bicycles from her neighbors and we rode out into the countryside to a farming village where tourists are invited to visit.
In the late afternoon we took another bike ride to Cau Dai beach, a little outside of town. We arrived just in time for sunset and a spectacular storm on the horizon. After a swim we “showered” with buckets of water out of a communal cistern (35 cent charge). We returned to our mats on the beach, where most of Julie’s extended family joined us, and we started ordering boiled crab and other seafood from the vendors who run back and forth from the water front to camp kitchens set up back in the palm trees. That was only an early supper. After we biked back to the house, they hit us with another feast of ban xeo, served family-style on the tile floor of the living room.
The next day was mostly taken up with a tour to My Son to see the Champa ruins. More on that another time.
On the second afternoon, we bicycled out to a different beach. Julie says people just started using it since a new road was built a few years ago, and I don’t see it mentioned in my guidebooks. We didn’t see any other foreigners there, so it was the kind of place where everyone stopped and stared at us. At one point, Ilene and Julie were trading tongue twisters (“Sally sells seashells . . .”), and when Ilene tried some in Vietnamese, a group of strangers gathered around for the show. We joined in a soccer game with a couple kids and quickly attracted a couple dozen more. As with other places we’ve been, every child shouted hello to us as we passed. Most of the children there swim naked, and the sea was bath-water warm.
Again, we had a couple more culinary discoveries that I’ll write about later, and again a lot of Julie’s family showed up, including her 80-year-old father who took a swim before dinner. (Her mother was at home working on yet another giant dinner for us.) Three waiters committed to our group hustled out food like a fire brigade. We were about seven adults and seven children grazing on various fresh seafood dishes, iced tea, ice coffee and beer, and at the end of the party I saw Julie’s sister pay the equivalent of $12. That’s how much Ilene and I would pay to rent two beach chairs in Delaware.
The next morning was mostly taken up with a trip to Marble Mountain. (More on that later.) Then, with our departure imminent, Julie’s sister took us on a very hasty trip to buy souvenirs using the friend-and-family discount at places where she knew the shopkeepers. When we rode back to the house on the motorbikes, balancing our cargo like natives, the driver was waiting for us with the trunk open, and Julie’s parents were at the curb fretting about us missing the plane. We hit the pavement in stride, tossed our souvenirs in the trunk—the same with our waiting luggage, packed with all the laundry that Julie’s mother had done for us—and, humbled by how far we were from being able to express our gratitude, we jumped in the car for a white-knuckle ride back to the Da Nang airport.
-Robert
