Good Morning Vietnam (Part 2)

After five, very full days, we left Northern Vietnam to travel to Hoi An, which is on Vietnam’s central coast. Hoi An is a small, fairly quiet town that runs along a series of canals. It is known for its architecture, colourful lanterns, amazing food, and tailor shops where you can have clothes custom-made for you within a day or two.

In planning the trip, Rob kept our time in Hoi An tour free, giving us a chance to rest and just explore on our own. We were able to easily walk to the ancient town from our hotel and then spent much of the day just wandering around and enjoying the sights. I fell in love with a few of the old buildings we saw there and appreciated having much less people around after the business of Northern Vietnam.

Like the places we had visited in the North, Hoi An also had beautiful pagodas surrounded by ponds and gardens but unlike the North, they just blended into the local landscape of the town. The bridge shown below actually uses Japanese architecture and includes a small temple inside. We didn’t go in but appreciated how pretty it was from the end of the small canal the bridge sat over.

The canal still appeared to be actively used by fisherman. It was interesting to watch this fisherman use his feet to manage his fishing net. The canals were of course also used for tourism. We didn’t see many people taking it up through the day, but certainly the tourist boats were in full swing when we came back at night.

And of course, there were all those lanterns! They were everywhere and added to the quaintness of this little town. This cool arrangement of decorative umbrellas also captivated me.

For some silly reason, I thought heading south would mean cooler temperatures and less humidity. Boy, was I wrong!! As you can see from the picture below, I was an absolute sweaty mess by lunch time. Fortunately, our hotel had this lovely pool so we were able to cool off and enjoy some downtime before heading back down town for the evening.

Hoi An definitely comes alive at night. I couldn’t work out where all the people had suddenly come from! From a distance, it is especially pretty at night with everything lit up but I found it a bit disheartening to see the level of pollution occurring from the lighting of paper lanterns in the canal. While I could appreciate how meaningful it is from a cultural perspective, there must be a way the practice can be adapted to avoid filling the canals with rubbish.

We had only a few hours the next morning before need to head to the airport for a flight to Ho Chi Minh. Our hotel had bicycles available for guests so we decided to ride to the beach. I think bike riding in Vietnam, was one my favourite activities. On this ride, we had to ride over a number of rice paddies. We’d seen some in our previous travels, but this trip gave us time to stop and take them in. After only a few days away from Australia, I realised how much I’d missed the sound of the waves. But again, the impacts of tourism and cultural differences in caring for the environment were evident, making us miss home all the more.

Next stop was Hoi Chi Minh, traditionally known as Saigon. It is home to about 10 million people and is a much more modern city than the other places we had visited in Vietnam. More people of course meant more scooters and we were back to navigating a decisive path through traffic to cross the street. After all the practice we’d had in Hanoi, we managed pretty well.

To start our first full day in Ho Chi Minh, we took a tour that brought us to the Independence Palace. It was here that that famous event took place where a North Vietnamese army tank crashed through the gates which marked the end of Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon. This led to the reunification of Northern and Southern Vietnam.

What a place! The architecture was incredible both inside and out, and it still contained the furnishings and design. Both Rob and I were surprisingly impressed with this tour, though I’m struggling to articulate why. In part, it was because of our incredible tour guide who took time to explain the history of the palace and traditional cultural practices that took place in its many, many rooms. Here’s just a few of the many, many pictures we took as we wandered through.

After leaving the palace, our tour guide told us we were heading to the post office – really??? It turns out that post office in Ho Chi Minh is listed as one of the most beautiful post offices in the world. Our tour guide told us it was ranked fourth, but when I looked it up when we got home, some sources actually list it as second. The post office was built in the 1800s using French architecture and is actually still fully functioning. As much as I initially thought it was a bit of an odd tour stop, it was actually pretty cool.

After a fantastic lunch, we headed out to our last stop of the day – the Cu Chi Tunnels. The tunnels were originally built during the Indochina War and then expanded during the Vietnam War where they were used as the base for the Viet Cong. The underground system had different layers at different depths underground and were used for sleeping, meeting, hiding, storage, and moving from one place to the next. They were protected by camouflaged trap doors and a range of horrific booby traps. They were very narrow with limited ventilation so I was a bit nervous about going into one, but fortunately, they’ve widen the diameter of a small section or two to accommodate the size of us Western tourists. Our guide for the day again impressed us with his historical knowledge which it turns out he’s acquired through generational stories shared by his grandfather and uncles who lived through the war. I felt so privileged to hear the personal stories he shared.

And that ended our first full day in Ho Chi Minh. On day 2, we headed to the Mekong Delta on another small-group tour, which included a fun foursome from South Africa which kept us laughing all day. The tour started with a visit to the Vinh Trang Pagoda. gardens and ponds.

The grounds of this pagoda included a number of large Buddha statues, both male and female, and of course stunning gardens and ponds.

We next boarded a boat called a sampon to travel to Unicorn Island. Once there, we went out on smaller boats along a tree lined canal and then off for another boat ride before enjoying a traditional lunch.

After lunch, we were shown how the local islanders make a type of toffee and also offered a hard to turn down (kidding!) offer to try snake wine. Rob and I were both laughing at the various potential Border Security scenes bringing a bottle of this in the country would bring. Sadly, this meant we also couldn’t bring in the amazingly cheap fresh honeycomb they had, but Rob did get to hold the bees.

The afternoon ended with some local islanders sharing their traditional music and some fresh coconut water for the boat ride back.

When we got back to the city, we decided to brave one more experience of chaos and went to check out the city market. It was massive with rows and rows and rows of stuff, much of which looked the same, and much of that, poor knock-offs of North American and European brand names. We couldn’t work out how each individual vendor managed to sell enough to make a living, but it appears they must do.

After leaving the market, we went out for our last Vietnamese meal and unknowingly ended up in a Korean restaurant. Rob was pretty happy to be grilling again

And just like that, our 10 days had come to end. It felt too short and just long enough all the same time. Hopefully we will have more travels and adventures to share with you soon. Until then…