Visiting Hoi An: The Gradual Escapist

“In case of emergency, make your bunker somewhere gorgeous and tropical.” – Old Sean

Plan Alterations

Following the end of my visit to Japan, I headed to Hoi An, Vietnam, where I would have a chance to recuperate and plan at almost zero expense. 

Indeed, my private hotel room overlooking the pool outside of Hoi An’s main city was only $185 dollars for the entire month and food bought at the haggling market is cheap enough for me to tread water financially simply by working online 20 hours a week.

This turned out to be an excellent chain of logic, as my Hohhot company contacted me with no prior warning, firing me with impunity. 

Well, almost impunity. 

I was almost done there, but the lack of notice and the fact they’ve done this with another staff members has made me wary. It’s important to note that the Chinese government essentially passed a law guaranteeing teacher payment over the viral shutdown. 

Rather than pay me, they decided it was easier to sever without notice.  In a couple of weeks, if there are no replies to my bi-daily pleas for information, I’m going to spend a bit of time essentially starting arbitration.

I recommend having an airtight contract if one plans on working in China. 

Admittedly, it’s not a bad job. There are great students, a wonderful atmosphere, fun lessons but ruthless management.

However, I’ve been expecting this for quite some time. As a result, I’ve been saving aggressively since getting out of debt several months ago and my largest expense, a vacation to Japan, has been put to bed.

Life in Vietnam

I’m going to stay in Vietnam until I can cement a different career path going forward.  Teaching English is a great way to see the world, but it’s essentially a gap year job, without enough of an earning statement to viably make it back into the US, European, Irish, UK or Canadian job markets.

I couldn’t have picked a better place to relax and plot, however.  Hoi An is a famous destination area full of tourists that helped put the area on the international map about ten years ago.  Hoi An isn’t just one central area, but rather the rather sporadic townships spread across a peninsula cut by numerous rivers, deltas and swamps.

My villa, the lovely Rural Scene Villa is located away from the main action on Cam Nam Island. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to be using the unaccented English letters for many of the names of places during this post to save time copy and pasting everything).

My villa boasts a narrow pool shaded by a banana grove, off the main road and complete with a stately room and a large drip shower that I use twice daily (it’s hot here and after so long in chilly places, I tend to sweat and drip like a drainpipe in the monsoon season).

The weather is almost uniformly sunny and beautiful, thanks to the brutal rainy season just clearing out before the true heat of summer arrives.  Occasionally, a wickedly powerful storm blows through, but then they die out immediately.  January to March is considered the best time to visit the entire area.

Visiting Hoi An

Hoi An’s biggest draw is the large Old Town area, which has a lot of colonial influence.  Impressive canary yellow buildings line the river and make up huge shopping and tourism districts primarily for walking.  Shops show off clothes, cheap tailoring shops, the normal tourist trinkets and some truly impressive lantern making workshops.

Speaking of lantern workshops, Hoi An is stunningly impressive at night.  The lines of tourists thicken but their hectic nature calms down, making the entire process calmer, more tranquil. Whole streets are alit with lanterns of every varying shade, strung across shop windows, street posts and ever tree available. 

If one listens carefully, there is usually a serenade of violin or harp music playing throughout the entire shopping district at night.  Heading to the riverside reveals numerous boats studded with even more lanterns, floating peacefully on the water. 

People try to lure tourists on for expensive photos or cheap little rides up and down the river.  As Valentine’s Day draws near, the crowds of romantic tourists on the water have increased dramatically, though public displays of affection aren’t very acceptable in Vietnam.

Riverlands

The rivers are also alive with small floating candles sent out to sea, eventually doomed to be snuffed out by the brackish currents.  But for the time being, they drift brightly.  If one looks down into the water, there are also loose swarms of needlefish lethargically spearing through the water, occasionally turning hopefully to a person’s wavering form, looking for a handout.

Shops and restaurants absolutely dominate the waterfront and the number of tourists around here is staggering.  The further a person gets away from this area, the better.  That being said, I’ve discovered a few culinary delights I’m very fond of.

Miss Ly has some very enjoyable food. 

I’m also fond of the famous White Rose Dumplings found specifically at Tran Tuan Ngai (533 Hai Ba Trung Street).  Bistro Street has the well-made and affordable coffee in town, though coffee shops everywhere here are pretty good.  The restaurant Vietnamese Chopsticks (Dua Viet Restaurant) is my favorite place for cheap food and beer on the way home and I have trouble passing by without stopping for a snack.  

Nu Eatery was an accidental, though apparently famous, find that makes amazing smoothies and has great service.  Hola Taco has an odd assortment of Mexican options, but I really like their pumpkin tacos, which seems like they shouldn’t exist, but I’m grateful they do. 

I recommend against eating on An Hoi Island, which while boasting beautiful river views and wonderful food options, is nearly three times as expensive as dining elsewhere in the city.

Living in Hoi An

The other most common feature of Hoi An includes numerous, notoriously cheap massage shops that exist on almost every corner. 

I stopped at one for a very pleasant evening and visited again the next day while a couple of the employees tried to show me how to eat snails.  You take a long thorn and jab into an extremely small snail shell, roughly the size of a fingernail, and pry out some of that amorphous-deliciousness.  I actually like the flavor quite a bit, but didn’t care for the texture much.  I tried eight before decided that was plenty of culinary adventures for the moment.

Also unique to Hoi An are numerous temples absolutely blanketed by flowers in full bloom.  Temples in Hoi An and the surrounding area don’t have to be big; one out in the rice fields is a mere three steps tall.  But they are all uniformly splashed with powerful primary colors and tend to catch the eye beyond anything else in a given area.

My favorite sight so far is actually a small workshop that offers classes in bamboo-shoot-carving.  Tiny faces are etched into bamboo’s surfaces, the root-work taking on the appearance of a tangled beard or thick shock of gnarled hair.

Afield Hoi An

However, Hoi An isn’t completely dominated by the Old Town Area.  A person can range much further out and find some far more interesting things. 

Most famous is the series of beaches on the Eastern Coast.  Bai Bien An Bang Beach Area is the best known, but has suffered from enough erosion to make the shoreline rather narrow.  It doesn’t have many people swimming, but tons of sunbathers that have purchased an umbrella for shade. 

A bit more interesting is Cua Dai Beach further to the south, which has large sandbags and lots of areas for swimming as well as some nifty little shaded palm-windbreakers along the shore. 

A person can range all the way to the tip of that particular peninsula accompanied by a refreshingly cool ocean breeze until they reach Tram Hai Dang Cua Dai, a miniature lighthouse with cool drinks, a small bay area and lots of hastily netted hammocks perfectly placed to absorb ocean breezes.

The common tour of Hoi An is oriented towards large bicycle routes, most of these cutting through the vast green rice paddies to the north.  They stretch for acres, bordered on all sides by narrow white houses with pinkish-tiled roofs. 

The people tending the field use, through convenience or tourism inclinations, the famous round woven hats associated with the region.  Other farms usually founded on more solid land are located around Tra Ques Vegetable Village, a quaint culinary and farming tourism experience on an island north of Old Town.  

Baby Mustard is my favorite restaurant in that area, munching away while watching people swing twin watering cans off a shoulder beam to care for their cultivation.

Strange Transit

Also immensely touristy is the presence of basket-boats.  These colorful, perfectly round instruments of water transport are hilarious to watch, since you can’t paddle them without tipping them forward like a lopsided hat on a drunk. 

However, they’re great for small river-ride and tourists are accompanied with loud music echoing over the water when they pile in.

Speaking of Hoi An’s music scene, it’s important (though generally warned against) to hear a residential area playing songs at night.  Aside from the garish neon lights that often decorate temples, family shrines and villas, there’s popular local Karaoke culture.  However, instead of performing like Japan or China, where quiet, sound-proof rooms are reserved for performances, Vietnam takes it another direction.  Speakers are stacked outside and family gatherings of free-flowing drink and food accompany solos and duets by people performing as loudly as humanly possible in the wee hours of the night.

It usually cuts off around nine or ten PM, but it’s still an interesting sight to behold.

Impressions of Hoi An

Overall, Hoi An is a beautiful and diverse area filled with many interesting activities.  Most of them are tourism-oriented, which I personally loathe, so I’ve only done what was available to me through person-to-person interactions or random encounters. 

The weather is gorgeous, the streets are dangerous, the food and lodging is cheap and the rivers are an astoundingly pleasant feature to look upon.

Anyway, I’ve actually just wrapped up my first week here in Hoi An.  Or at least I will have in a couple of days.  I’ve been more active than usual on account of just not knowing what to do and feeling a bit… drifty. 

The result has been a wide range of activities usually accenting general wandering.  I’ve biked virtually everywhere for simplicity sake (my villa provides one free) but I recommend most other visitors to rent a scooter.  They’re wildly dangerous and no matter how cautious you are on the road here, you’ll be running a considerable risk, but there’s really no other way to get around and range far.

On that happy note, I’m signing off to watch more of Lupin III (which I adore and didn’t know Part V ever came out). 

I’ll spend the rest of the month shedding the pounds I gained in Hohhot and Japan while filing my mess of taxes (5 jobs, 2 of them abroad).  Furthermore, I plan on exploring other options of potential employment.  I’m limited by the rather… inept nature of my current electronics, but I hope to remedy that upon going back to the states.

From lovely and active Vietnam, I’ll post again when I’ve spanned a bit further and wander a bit farther.

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written February 18th, 2020

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