Hot in the City

It was the day after Miss Mo's birthday and Superstar and her were off to Nam. After watching so many Vietnam war movies, I was really looking forward to finally visit this country.

Our Silkair flight was very pleasant because it was half empty. We both gorged down the curry rice and had some fine wine. The plane touched down at the Danang Airpok, a 70s-looking building. We were the only plane on the tarmac. The immigration took forever to make clearance. It took a very very long time.zzz...

After haggling with the taxi drivers for a good price to get to our hotel at Hoi An (so annoying!), we were finally on route to Hoi An via Danang. Danang doesn't have much appealing stuff to offer except that it has these cool South Beach art-deco-looking buildings. So trendy, so un-Vietnam!

Our hotel for the first night in Hoi An was basic although the service weren't too trusting and the breakfast needed lots of room for improvement. We had to go to its sister hotel next door for breakfast.

Hoi An is a lovely old town. It is somewhat like Malacca but only in Vietnam. It has a stinky river with nice little restaurants and cool bars. Several stores sell beautiful lanterns and some are art galleries. There are also assembly halls of different dialects and wet market and the famous Japanese bridge.

Our highlight of visiting Hoi An was staying at Ha An Hotel on our last night of our Vietnam trip. I chose to stay here after reading good reviews on the internet. I would say the reviews were very accurate. The hotel is like a sanctuary amidst the hustle and bustle of Hoi An town and it wasn't dusty! That was such a relief for us! The room was so inviting and the courtyard provided a place to relax. The breakfast spread was amazing and we absolutely had no complaints about this hotel. In fact, we highly recommend this place the next time you visit Hoi An.

On our second day in Vietnam, we took a 3 hour bus ride to Hue, the former capital of Vietnam. On the way to Hue, we stopped by 2 tourist spots - Marble Mountains, which is a range of 5 mountains made of marble and Lang Co beach resort, which was absolutely the most miserable beach resort I've ever seen. We also passed by the famous Hai Van pass, except now there is a new tunnel, which was so long and stinky too. Our main purpose to visit Hue was to visit the Citadel, the imperial palace of the fallen empire. I guess Hui was somewhat like the rest of Vietnam, full of traffic, dust, hustlers, etc. It was a drastic change from the serenity of Hoi An as the old town doesn't allow cars.

Something strange happened when our bus arrived at Hue. I didn't inform the hotel where and when our bus was arriving but somehow, someone from the hotel was there to pick us up. We were so grateful to see the guy because there were lots of scooter-taxis trying to offer us a ride for probably a lot of money.

It took us a while walk from our hotel, cross the Perfume river (it certainly didn't smell of perfume at all) to reach the Citadel after encountering a few Cyclos people. So annoying! The old palace didn't look nice from outside the walls. It looked dirty and not maintained. The worst was the entrance fee was 55,000 dong, which was kind of a lot in Vietnam standard. We contemplated for half hour outside the gate on whether we should spend that money but it was only 2pm and we didn't know what else to do. Alas, we decided to take the risk. Surprisingly, even though the palace was, as expected, not as majestic as the Forbidden City, the ruins turned out to be pretty nice on our pics! Kekeke!

The highlight of our trip was of course the meals that we had. We mainly patronized tourist restaurants because the hawkers did not have gas to heat their food so that was kind of scary. We savored Hoi An's unique dishes like Cao Lau and White Rose. I can't remember the other one. We also had various types of spring rolls (Nem), pho, fried rice, dishes wrapped in banana leaves, etc. We also tried their crepes and of course, the good old Vietnamese coffee. I think we spent an average of 60,000 dong per meal.

Hoi An has some cool bars. I can't think of anywhere else in Singapore that was like those bars. It's like some colonial bar, maybe like Long Bar at Raffles Hotel. It was a refuge for us to escape from the scorching afternoon sun in Hoi An. The drinks were so cheap too. Wine by the glass cost US$2.50 and beer was about 8000 dong. Cheap!

Besides the tourist attractions, the uniqueness of Hoi An's street scenes enabled Superstar to take millions of pics. Here are only a handful of them, some of them showing vendors taking naps in the middle of the day. Most of them are vendors counting money.

Overall, it was a good trip, albeit the heat and dust. I was pretty disciplined in my shopping too. I bought a lacquer painting of Hoi An town from this Korean-looking lady who pronounced 8 like the Aussies do. In fact, all of them pronounce 8 that way. We also bought napping Buddhas, which I haggled from US$17 to US$7. Kekekeke! We also spent too much time at the lantern shop, buying various sorts of lanterns. They were irresistible! Superstar even bought a shopping bag for Supermom too! Yeah!