Hoi An

If Chiang Mai is the Acapulco of Thailand and Luang Prabang is the Chiang Mai of Laos, then Hoi An is the Luang Prabang of Vietnam.  Which isn't to say that Hoi An isn't a great town to visit. 

If you ever go to Vietnam (and we think everyone we know would love it - because, yes, we do presume to know better than you what is best for you) Hoi An is a must-visit.  Sure, it's touristic.  But Hoi An shines in more ways than one, and at night especially, when it literally glimmers with the light of countless hand-made lanterns and is becomes atmospheric and romantic as any city, Venice included.  Hoi An has plenty to love during the day too, as it is the best preserved example of Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese architecture in all of Vietnam.  The Old Town is packed with tourists most times of day, but it also holds a few quiet streets and alleys if you wander around a bit, and it was in those moments, when we found some more quiet areas, like a bench at the side of a temple or a small, less visited street, that we really started to like Hoi An.

A beauty of a heavily touristed town is the wealth of good, clean, cheap restaurants those tourists, and their stomachs and wallets, attract.  Hoi An and Sapa lacked the culinary risk and excitement of Hanoi, but eating out in Hoi An was easy because it had so many "safe" options (though we were ready for street food prepared in rusty pans over portable gas burners and tiny plastic stools again by the time we left for Saigon).  Another benefit, and easily the most important, of having so many tourists in one place is that it creates an opportunity for really amazing non profit organizations like the

White Lotus' truly feel good food

Indochina Project and Reaching Out to do good work (both groups are great examples of how tourism can be beneficial to developing countries and interesting to learn about, if you have a chance to click the links and see what they are up to).  We stumbled onto Project Indochina the night we left Hoi An when we ate at their restaurant, White Lotus.  We had been frantically looking online for something close to our hotel where we were getting picked up to go to the airport and came across White Lotus without knowing that all of  the profits from the restaurant go to PI.  Our meal at White Lotus turned out to be our best in Hoi An, and one of the most delicious in Vietnam!

One of the Reaching Out Artists

Our visit to Reaching Out was more calculated, though Annette's purchase of a gorgeous tea set was less expected.  That purchase led to us buying another piece of luggage to carry all our swag home in, as well as one last visit to Reaching Out and their workshop the following day where we were privileged enough to meet a few of the artists responsible for such a beautiful and unique piece of art.  All of the artists at Reaching Out are disabled and it turns out one of the artisans was deaf, so we tried to figure out the differences between some of the ASL signs and their equivalent in Vietnamese sign language (we figured out "Thank You" was pretty much the same in both, but we think he knew how we felt about his work and the tea set long before we made the gesture from our dumb smiles and genuine expressions of gratitude).

Annette prepares to watch some guy cook

Amongst a host of other activities, Hoi An is touted as a great place to try your hand at Vietnamese cooking.  Naturally, we were keen to learn a few tricks and hopefully make some of our favorite Vietnamese dishes.  The class we chose (Red Bridge Cooking School) is one of the most popular in Hoi An and was aimed at a different crowd, maybe for people who wanted to eat fancy versions of Vietnamese food in a nice restaurant over actually getting their hands dirty.  Which is okay, but we had been hoping for something a little more like the excellent cooking experiences we'd had in Chiang Mai or Yangshuo,  It probably wasn't fair to put expectations on our Hoi An class, especially because Vietnam has shown us repeatedly that it marches to the beat of its own drum.  All in all, the class was alright, it had it's good

We made the rice paper for these rolls, and can't wait to do it again!

parts, but we both agreed it was a bit pricey for the amount of cooking and learning we actually did.  We tend to prefer cooking classes where we get 1st degree burns, grease splatters on our clothes, and chilies in our eyes.  Classes where we cook something from start to finish, eat the results, and can talk about what we'd do different next time at home.  Most of the food was pretty good, but we were basically just doing finishing work after a chef from the restaurant impersonally and quickly demonstrated each dish.  The knives were purposefully dull, because the chef's boss "Doesn't want guests to cut themselves."  Give us a break, this is supposed to be cooking school!  We did learn a few cool things that we're excited to try when we get home, like how to make fresh rice paper for spring rolls and one of Jeff's favorite Vietnamese dishes, Banh Xeo (a rice batter pancake with shrimp and pork, sometimes accompanied with a peanut dipping sauce).

Fabric!

The tourist activity Hoi An is most known for is tailoring.  All of Vietnam, and a few other places in SE Asia, are popular for having clothes tailor made as the work can be extremely good and extremely cheap.  Hoi An used to be famous for its cloth, but now its tailor industry has exploded - there were 14 tailor shops in Hoi An around 15 years ago and now there are well over 650 shops.  People don't just call you from their store-fronts as you walk past, they occasionally drive up on motorbikes to solicit their tailor shop to you.  The rent in Hoi An's old town is apparently quite high, and the popularity of getting clothes tailor-made there created an over-abundance of tailor shops, some of which are fronts for sweatshops, and others are operated by people with little or no experience in the craft of custom making clothes.  Much of this darker side was unbeknownst to Jeff when he decided to get two suits made.  He made an attempt to ensure his clothes would be made under fair practices, but in retrospect, for other reasons, he maybe should have looked around a bit before committing to one shop.  We got a good feel for the first place we sniffed out and went with them based largely on the fact that the owner had been one of the original fourteen in town.  The shop has held a good reputation in the past, but our experience was of poor service, a debilitating lack of English spoken by the staff, not enough involvement from the owner (who was usually trying to chat us up about her hotel and other business efforts), and overall rough work on the suits.  They weren't awful, but neither of us felt like they were quite what we'd hoped for.  It is possible that they'll look much better after they are dry cleaned (which is apparently the solution to every problem we found with the suits, "Fixed after dry cleaners!") and we get to look at them in a new, detached light.  That is, of course, what we are hoping for.  Don't get us wrong, it was a fascinating experience - one that gave Jeff plenty of opportunities to blather and ramble about how to run a business (which is always entertaining, since he talks as if he has, but of course has not).  It was interesting to jump through the hoops and see what so many others go to Hoi An for.  Many have entire outfits, even wardrobes made in Hoi An, as they are famous for being able to copy a garment from a sample or photograph.
 

Jeff standing poolside at our first Hoi An hotel

As a microcosm for many of the places we've visited in the last eight months that are less well off than the Western world, Hoi An taught us a thing or two. It showed us the good and bad sides of tourism, right next to each other.  Tourist dollars can inspire people to create opportunities for others, but those same dollars can also give people dreams of making a quick, dishonest buck. On the lighter side, it also reminded us that while sometimes cheesy (like the "traditional music and dance" performance we watched) and disappointing (like the salad and service we had at the ever-popular Cargo Club), tourist-oriented towns like Hoi An have many things that make them a lot of fun to visit.  We stayed in two of our favorite hotels for our entire time in Vietnam whilst in Hoi An, and ate a few of our favorite meals there too (the aforementioned White Lotus dinner and a lunch at the Mermaid Cafe).  We continue to learn and grow as we travel, sometimes from unexpected events or places.  The tourist-driven economy of Hoi An opened our eyes to a few things and got us discussing some deeper topics between smoothies, perfect chocolate mouse cakes, and holding hands on a bench overlooking hundreds of  brightly lit lanterns.

Hoi An shines at night as thousands of handmade lanterns light up