How To Get To Hoi An

After a night of broken sleep I finally dragged myself out of my sleep-sheet and assessed the situation. The old lady had gone, I assumed she had got off at one of the stations along the way and not “gone” gone. I had heard a few announcements over the PA system, but some of them were only in Vietnamese, so we didn’t know exactly what they were telling us. It seemed like they gave a description of the station/town that we were approaching, which was a nice touch, but not at 5:00am in the morning!

Oooh........Vietnam

The train pulled into Da Nang just after noon, and only a few minutes late too. Now came the tricky bit. I had read that there is no train connection to Hoi An so we would need to either pay anything up to $15 for the cab ride there (3o minutes) or try and find a bus that would take us there, on which the fare seemed to vary depending on your negotiation skills. So we opted for option 2 and if all else failed we could still jump in a cab anyway. The hotel had also offered to pick us up, for 350,000 Dong (about £11.60) but we had politely declined. I followed the instructions I had saved onto my phone and we found the road where the buses left. There seemed to be no bus stop, just hail the bus when it went past. We were looking out for a big yellow bus with Xe Buyt written on the front that should take us all the way to Hoi An. It wasn’t long before one turned up and jumped on, at the back, just like in the good ol’ days. It was pretty crowded and very shoddy, but we grabbed two seats at the back and kept an eye on our luggage. More and more people got on and the two guys running the show were shouting out instructions and banter for most of the journey. The girl sitting next to James said the fare was about 18,000 Dong, which was very manageable (it’s about 30,000 to the pound). Then she said that she had heard them saying it would be double as we are foreigners. OK, we had prepared ourselves for this. But then the thin, slightly scary one said it would be 40,000 Dong. Still a small price, but it was the principle of it all that made James try and barter with the guy claiming, whilst smiling, that our dad was Vietnamese so we should pay less. It didn’t work, and we paid the 40,000 Dong.

Chubby guy running the bus scam

We arrived at the bus station just outside of town and set off in the general direction of the hotel, with me trying to locate it on my phone via GPS, a photo from Google Maps and the directions from Booking.com. After a brief chat with a guy called Sun (apparently) we managed to find it and check in. It looked great inside and we were thankful to be back in a nice hotel with a window, and hopefully no cockroaches!

The Sunshine Hotel pool!

The weather had been threatening to thunderstorm all day but it hadn’t yet happened. Just as we were looking to leave the hotel and have a wander it finally hit us and put us back in the room. I had scouted out some places to eat that night, but it looked like we would be dining in the hotel from what we could gather from the worsening weather outside. But there was a let-up in the shower and we ventured out, with our raincoats, of course!

We had heard that Hoi An was beautiful, and boy was it! Down in the Old Town, by the river, the buildings are a grubby yellow colour with dark brown beams and roofs, from the French colonial era. Being the “home of lanterns” there were hundreds of them scattered through the streets and across the river. It was great to see at night with all of them lit up and dancing in the breeze. We found a nice eatery down by the river and watched the people scurrying around in the on-off rain. 80% of them had the multi-coloured ponchos on and we toyed with the idea of buying some ourselves as they seemed to go further down the leg than our raincoats, but we had sent all the hawkers away already and none were making an appearance, so we kept the money for a dessert.

Hoi An - the home of lanterns

We had to time our walk back to the hotel well as the rain was still pouring, and when we saw the window of opportunity we went for it! It was a good call as we hardly got wet on the way back, and even had time to stop off at a local shop to pick up a couple of cans of cheap beer (30p a go) and some snacks for later.