Hoi An Market
There were not 10 hours. There were 17 because the bus broke in the middle. This is a common thing in SE Asia. I read about long trips like this many times, on blogs, travelogues, travel books, etc. but is the first time when I experimented directly. The bus had something when we left around 8pm and it stopped after a while to fix it. I got asleep almost from the beginning and I just sensed what was going on. I sleep well in these buses because I don’t have any worries and they are comfortable. I woke up when he stopped again at 12:30 am for the late driver’s dinner, in one of the bus stops in the way. There were two other buses and another that came after us, and all of them left and we stayed. At one point I got upset and I went to press the horn to call the driver to senses and just then another bus came, who was heading to Nha Trang. The driver asked us to exchange the buses with the other passengers and we hoped that he did this because we had problems with ours but the surprise was ours when the new bus we mounted could not start. It had something with the transmission. The driver tried several times to no avail and went to work on the transmission. The results were not positive, and he gave up and went to sleep showing me on his watch something like 6:00 am. I hoped that he talked with the office to send us another bus but , probably in Vietnam this is not an option. So, all of us, Vietnamese and westerners went to sleep in the bus and we slept very well and I woke up at 6:00am. Right away I went on to wake up the driver because the others were quite shy and I asked him to give me his cellphone to call the office. He was not happy but complied and I told the guys from the office the situation we were in. The driver continued latter to talk with them and I don’t know what they talked because he started again to work on the transmission and and to our surprise he fixed it in 15 minutes and at 6:45am we left to Hoi An where we arrived at 1:00pm. We lost 1/2 day but it was no big deal because the city is small and manageable in 1/2 day. The advantage was that driving on day we were able to see the rice fields and also I could read a lot from my book, Sacred Willow, that gave a little more insight in the history of Vietnam.
HoiAn is a port and used to be an important harbor and city at the par with Melaka, and Macau. It is the only city in Vietnam that preserved its old architecture, sometimes altered by the French colonial buildings. Otherwise, is a town left behind in time, that makes it very charming. Is also the capital of the tailors, having lots of shops that make suits and shirts. It’s an artistic city also with lots of galleries catering for the immense number of tourist who come here in huge groups. It is the first time in this trip when I see so many tourists and so many groups. I strolled the city’s alleys and small streets looking for the old houses, assembly halls and pagodas that were marked in the book to be visited. In town they have an interesting scheme: you pay 75000 dongs and you can visit one of each, but if you want to visit a second of the same, let’s say another old house you have to pay again. But everything has a work around and there are several ways to do it here also. So I visited several assembly halls , one 200 years old house owned at the 7th generation, temples and pagodas and lots of stores. I went to the market that is spectacular, being, beside others, a fish market and I paced the streets looking for an internet phone, this time discovering the post office and finding out that the regular call on land line is almost 10 times more that an internet call. It is still not expensive!. I called home, I ate some Lau Cao that is a specialty on Hoi An, a sort of noodles with meat and crumb bread like a cracker, all in a 5 course meal and I chat with some older Germans who were traveling with a group. Tomorrow, I wanted to wake up at 5;00am to visit My Son, the old capital of their Chama kingdom, but the minibus was full so I will go with a regular bus at 8:00 coming back at 1:00 and, if i do not change my mind, get a 2:00 pm bus to Hue.
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