Hoi An

Per the last post, we left Ho Chi Minh City on an 18hr sleeper train taking us over 1,000km up the Vietnamese coast to Hoi An. We expected to share our four-berth sleeping cabin with a couple of people; unfortunately, it was a young Vietnamese child and her mother, whose plan for keeping the girl occupied was to let her scroll through TikTok without headphones for ten hours straight. You'll learn how close the backing track for 'Funkytown' is to sleep deprivation torture when you listen to a fragment of it repeated 40+ times after 10pm.

Our destination, Hoi An, is a small historic town in central Vietnam, just outside the larger city of Da Nang. It's famous for its 500+ tailors, so it has been on our radar for most of the year as a checkpoint for us to refresh our wardrobes with some new clothes. Our plan was to spend a few days here, buy new garbs, and send a load of stuff back to the UK. More on that later!

The town itself is beautiful, full of paper lanterns, cheap and delicious local food, river boats, colonial balconies and temples. Luckily, we're here in the low season for tourists—it's fairly busy even now, so we dread to think how packed it must get in summer. You could walk across the river at sunset just by jumping from boat to boat of Chinese tourists with coloured lanterns. Very beautiful, but also very Instagram-friendly in the worst way possible. There were never fewer than two drones in view during the evenings.

Don't let that suggest that we don't like it though: this place is beautiful! In between visits to the tailors, we took a morning to paint ceramic masks, made several visits to Mrs Diep's stall in the food market (our new favourite food vendor), and tried a few pints of the questionably named 'Heart of Darkness' beer. We also spent an evening at the incredible Bamboo Circus gymnastics show (thanks to Dan's mum for the recommendation), and sat people-watching by the riverside with banh mi dinner. There's live music in a lot of the pubs, including a Vietnamese AC/DC tribute band who we are now considering flying back to the UK for our wedding.

On our last day, we jumped on Grab bikes for a beach day at An Bang. Who knew Vietnam had such beautiful beaches? Chelsea did, because she's been here before. But even so. They had an attendant who came along with a feather duster to brush the sand off your lounger and feet. Or at least, he did for everyone on the beach except Dan 😭 What's wrong with Dan's feet? Is his sand not good enough?!

Knowing that we'd have a chance to send things home from Hoi An, this has been a checkpoint in the year that we've been anticipating for a while. After just over 4 months on the road, we have a better sense of what's worth keeping, and what is too big or heavy to justify carrying until December. In some cases we've just finished with things but don't want to throw them away, like Chelsea's scuba mask. Some of the stuff we've decided to jettison include:
- Binoculars
- Camera tripod
- Scuba stuff
- Various souvenirs
- Notebooks we've filled up
- Dive bag
- Tin mugs
- Extra clothes

We've managed to dispense with ~5-6kg of stuff (plus a few tailored clothes), which makes a big difference to our backpacks. We'll have a new spring in our step as we head onto our next destination tomorrow. And plenty of space for clothes to bring the weight back up 🫠Read more