Day 232 - Hanging in Hoi An's Old Town

It was still drizzling when we woke up, and we thought "here we go again" so we put on our wet clothes from yesterday, and set off to explore anyway - one thing's for sure: you can't control the weather, so you might as well adlib it anyway.

Hoi An is a World Heritage Site and is most famous for its old town that managed to escape destruction during the war, and has therefore managed to retain its old town character. When you glance at black and white photos from decades ago, it looks much the same as today - perhaps minus a couple of coats of paint - and this is surely the reason why it's so popular. The Hoi An Old Town is off-limits to cars (but this prohibition clearly doesn't apply to motorbikes), which makes wandering it a little less stressfree than other places in Vietnam. Though in Vietnam, all you have to do is make eye contact with the drivers and walk really slow as they tend to just weave around you.
The old town is full of museums, old family homes, assembly halls, bridges and temples. If you buy a ticket you get entrance into one of each, and we followed the Lonely Planet's reccommendations and spent the better part of the day wandering amongst the history - we checked out the delightful Japanese Covered Bridge, Quan Cong's Temple, the Tran Family Chaple, the Museum of Trade Ceramics (it was more the building that interested us, not the ceramics: most of them were from places we'd been to in China anyway!), and a musical performance at the Handicraft Workshop. The sun even began to shine! One interesting thing about this town is that there are influences from several different cultures in existence - the majority of the temples and old houses are Chinese in origin and style, but they also have some distinct Vietnamese architecture, and even some Japanese style thrown in there for good measure.
We enjoyed walking along the river and through the street fruit markets, as well as making some purchases of a hat and sunglasses to replace the ones he lost over the side of the boat on our frist day in Vietnam!

For lunch we both dined on some local delicacies - Adam had White Rose (shrimp wrapped in thin rice paper), shrimp wrapped over sugar can, and Cau Lau (pork, noodles, herbs, and crispsy rice paper) and Liv had the vege version.

At the end of the day we spent a couple of hours waiting for the night to come at a riverside restaurant where Adam finally got to partake in Bia Hoi - a Vietnamese tradition of drinking cheap beer by the pint-load. Adam also ordered grilled fish wrapped in banana leaf - another specialty of this region - for dinner. All too soon, it was time for us to leave Hoi An and head further south. 12 hours on a sitting bus, here we come!!

Adlibing a real old town.