Food, glorious food!

Hoi An

After our experiences so far of travelling on uncomfortable buses, it was a pleasant surprise that our bus transport from Hué to Hoi An was spacious and relaxing, and actually allowed you to lie down (as well as you could hope anyway). On arrival in Hoi An we definitely overpaid for a taxi to our accommodation, which still frustrates me to this day, as we should have known better by this point in our travels. Nonetheless, we arrived at our ‘homestay’, which was essentially a large house with a handful of private rooms for guests. Our host, Ms. Ann was extremely friendly and helpful and gave us lots of advice about the area and always offering bicycles for travelling around. Hoi An is known as the place to go in Vietnam if you are looking for custom-made clothing at reasonable prices and most places will make direct copies of clothes if you provide them a picture of what you’re looking for. After suffering the pain of breaking my flip-flops in Hanoi (I loved them flip-flops!), I set about replacing them. Thankfully my replacements are now my new favourites and definitely the most comfortable I have ever had!

Hoi An is a small-ish town with several parallel running streets set against a small riverside, which itself contains lots of bars and restaurants. At night the town is lit up beautifully and makes for a very atmospheric setting when relaxing with food and drinks, and it is one of my favourite places in all of Southeast Asia. We also experienced some truly wonderful food in Hoi An, and certainly some of the best Phó soup in all of Vietnam (courtesy of Ms. Ann’s restaurant). I can’t emphasise enough how good the food in Hoi An was in general, at every place we ate and if we’d stayed any longer than a few days we would definitely be working our way back from obesity.

On our last full day in Hoi An we were finally treated to some glorious weather and walked to the beach, which took around 45 minutes plus another hour of walking along the beach. Jane had wanted to take up Ms. Ann on her offer of the bicycles to get there and in hindsight we probably should have when we realised that we’d walked nearly 6km!! (I’m still very sorry ;-)). We ate (more wonderful food) at a restaurant on the seafront and basked in the glorious weather and beautiful views of the ocean.