Last night we arrived in Hoi An and instantly loved it. It looked like Gion in Kyoto, the geisha district, with lanterns decorating all the shops, and across the river we could see lights glittering in the water. The poverty and dirt we’d seen everywhere else in Vietnam seemed to have disappeared.
We went in search of dinner and I was instantly waylaid by an adorable jacket outside a shop. The shopkeeper invited me to try it on but when it fitted pretty much perfectly, instead of asking if I wanted to buy it, she started measuring me – and that was our first taste of Hoi An tailoring. I let myself be talked into a suit as well (without resisting too hard), and after measuring every conceivable part of me, she told me to come back the next day after lunch. But when we walked back past the next morning, she called us in – they were ready for fitting. It had only been about 16 hours since we first walked in, and most of those had been the time when normal people are asleep.
This town essentially contains three kinds of shops: tailors, art galleries, and souvenir shops (the last containing jewellery, lacquerware, teapots, lanterns, and pretty much everything else). Even Sim fell prey to the lure of the tailors and ordered a couple of shirts. It’s a beautiful town, but I don’t know what came first – the beauty or the tourists.
The tourists are everywhere, as we found out once the sun had risen. By day, Hoi An is the stomping ground of greyhounds-full of tour groups. They swarm down the main streets and the shopkeepers all stand out the front calling them inside. It’s almost impossible to move. They take photos of everything – old women, moss, gutters, whatever you can think of. The tourist to local ratio is obscenely high.
When looking for somewhere to eat last night, Sim’s main criterion was to find somewhere that wasn’t full of Westerners and/or didn’t have hamburgers on the menu. It was a tall order, but eventually we found a restaurant with lots of local specialties that was virtually empty. We sat down and ordered, and then found out there was a garden out the back so we thought we’d head out there to escape the heat…turns out that’s where all the Westerners were. Still, we had some pretty great food there, so I’m certainly not complaining.
If we were wondering where the locals ate, we didn’t wonder very long, as we found them all the next day when we walked around the marketplace. They still prefer the pop-up stalls under tarps with the child-size plastic seats, with dirty water from the markets running through and chickens pecking around their feet. It’s only the Westerners that eat in actual restaurants.
It’s the end of the rainy season and the river is flooded here. The shops along the riverbank have water lapping at their back doors, and the main bridge across the river is only accessible by wading. This afternoon we saw a Vietnamese man in an impeccable white suit with his girlfriend crossing the bridge and stopped to see what he would do – a local took pity on him and gave him a piggy back through the water. This morning we saw several local women, ever resourceful, waiting in little boats at the point where one of the main roads became submerged, ready to punt any tourists across to the bridge. While we were at dinner in a restaurant down by the river, a woman waded past with a basket full of plastic ponchos and tried to sell them to us through the window.
It’s certainly a town that is at its best at night. By day it’s just some town full of tourists, but by night it’s a town full of beautiful and fascinating objects, where every restaurant has a cocktail list, and everyone is busy relaxing (except the locals, whose job it is to help the Westerners relax). It’s the first place in Vietnam where being a Westerner and living here seems conceivable. Sim has already developed a plan to open an indie bar here, so if anyone needs a gig, let us know.