You know, it’s pretty easy to live the good life in Vietnam on what we Westerners would regard as a ridiculously cheap budget. For example, $25 AUD a night will get a double room in a nice place, fairly central to anything that you’d like to see in your town of choice. If you’re hungry, well then drop $3 AUD and you won’t need to eat until the following day, and if you’re a bit of a pisshead, $10-$15 AUD will get you comfortably tanked!
What to say about Hoi An? Well this place definitely oozes charm and history. What once use to be a sleepy riverside village residing on the Thu Bhon river, occupied by early Western traders, has now turned into somewhat of a tourist town, full of hotels, bars and tailors…hundreds and hundreds of tailors. Anything you want, any clothing item you need, well they’ll measure you up and have you walking out of the store in your ‘made to measure’ suit by the close of play that day!
The town itself is said to have a distinctly Chinese atmosphere with low, roof tiled houses and narrow streets, the original structure of some places still remaining in tact. What also makes this place unique is the fact that the centre of town has been closed off to all motorised traffic, so all you need to dodge are errant bicyclists or rickshaw drivers, other than that, it’s pedestrian central and you’re free to roam at will. With that said, it was all these elements that initially captured my interest the last time I was here, and of course the fact that getting decent quality suits done for $60-$70 USD was simply a crime against reason. As I’ve said in early posts, it was on my last day trip here that I’d convinced myself that I’d be back in a hurry to get my wardrobe sorted out with some Vietnamese ‘suit style’ action, and hence today, 26-DEC-09, was to be the day that I kept that promise to myself.
After the late night or early morning of the day before, Jet decided to adopt a tack of self preservation and crashed out in the early morning whilst I hit Nguyen Duy Hieu street in search of the much recommended Tony the Tailor. The walk from the Nhi Nhi took me right across down and getting there was approximately a 20-25 min walk, it was the only time that I didn’t undertake the trip to Tony’s on a bike, which in turn would only ever take me all of 5-7mins in future. Walking into Tony’s premises really felt like you’d just dropped in at a friends place. I sat down, chatted, had myself a drink went through the types of fabric, patterns, etc and then ‘hey presto’, I’d locked myself into five tailor made shirts and two suits…there was more to come of course but for day one it wasn’t too bad a start.
Hoi An - from our room at the Nhi Nhi Hotel
Making my way back to the Nhi Nhi I encountered an ever recovering Frichot almost in the position to get himself moving to check out the down. After half a cup of HTFU we were out on our bikes and cruising the town for a bit of a look around. To tell you the truth, this just set the tempo for our day, we cruised around the Ancient Town of Hoi An, stopping in at a few places for a cocktail or two and then just pushed on to the next place to have another drink.
Hoi An - Ancient Town Centre
Japanese Bridge - Hoi An
Then when we’d completed a couple of rounds we rode up to Tran Hung Dao road, hung a right, and road the 5kms out of town to Cua Dai beach. The ride out to the beach was an absolute pleasure, just really cruisy and chilled out, which is exactly what you want a holiday to be. I just remember being particularly in the moment, enjoying the spectacular scenery and thinking that it’s the rare moments such as these that somehow make certain trips unforgettable. As we cruised down Trung Hung Dao Rd we passed a few bamboo bars that were built on platforms hovering above the river and I made a mental check to at least stop at one of them on our return leg.
Cua Dai Beach - Hoi An
Cua Dai Beach with Cham Island in the background - Hoi An
When we got to Cua Dai beach we pulled up one of the many deck chairs that were on offer, got ourselves a couple of drinks and looked out over the South China Sea on what was just a fantastic afternoon in the sun. Watching the world go by, listening to the pounding of the waves and enjoying the sun on our faces I think both Jet and I crashed out for an hour or so before we realised that the afternoon sun was dropping away fairly quickly and with it so too was the temperature. On our cycle back into town we stopped at the My Son café on the river just to take in the remains of the day and to enjoy the last rays of light before trying to nut out where we’d be drinking for the evening.
Riding back to town
Riverside cafe - Hoi An
My Son Cafe - Hoi An
On this night we pulled up at Thien Than’s restaurant, aka Messi’s bar, which was the last bar situated on Nha Hang St, an area located across the bridge and directly opposite the Ancient Town. This one was Frichot’s call, I think he was enticed by the music and the dark and dingy vibe of Messi’s. What we came to realise pretty quickly was that senor Messi was in the business of selling a potent mix of vodka, Red Bull, Sprite and some other random spirit, all mixed into a huge class bucket. This necessary evil, known now as the infamous Messi bucket, was a whole 50,000 VND burn to the back pocket, which essentially translated as $3AUD….ouch??? Enough to do your head in of course and enough to get you damn messy after a couple. As the night progressed, we drank, we ordered food, we drank some more and Jet hardened the hell up by taking a few more Messi’s down.
Hoi An
Hoi An
A little while into the evening we started chatting to a pretty cool couple Melbourne, Nick and Nadia. I don’t know how but Jet had somehow spotted the two of them on the road earlier in the day when we were on the ride out to the beach and then went on to recount in quite some detail everything he had remembered of their sighting! Of course, this amazed the both of them but the truth of the matter was that Nadia was a bit of a hottie and I’m sure Frichot found all the details of that sighting far easier to remember that some other random adventurers we’d passed that day. In any case, it was Nick’s birthday this evening and they were in the last few hours of their stay in Hoi An, so how else to celebrate such an auspicious occasion? Messi buckets all round!!!
Frichot - 'Gettin Messi'
De Niro - 'Gettin Messi'
Everyone 'Gettin Messi'!!!
Frichot and I ended up staying for a little while longer, somehow got stuck into a conversation with a couple of girls, one being from Ontario, Can, and the other from Scotland. I was kind of into the Canadian chick but unfortunately she turned out to be more than a little flakey, and not particularly interested in me after a few drinks. Never to be denied by the fantastic affects of alcohol and realising that Messi’s was turning into a little bit of a ‘lights out event’ in a monastery, we decided that drinking and riding was the thing to do and that there ‘MUST’ be some type of cool beach party cranking down on Cua Dai beach, or so the rumour around town had us believing. So how about a 5km ride out to the beach when you’re half totalled? Sure, sounds like a reasonable thing to do, why the hell not!?
Really not sure how we managed to stay on the bikes and in turn find our way out to the beach but we got there at sometime close to about 1:30am. The only problem with that was that there was no beach party to be seen anywhere, and none to be heard either. Still, I think one of my favourite parts of the trip happened at that point, we both just walked out onto the beach and stood at the waters edge, looking up at the stars, listening to the waves roll in and eyeing off the lights of Da Nang in the distance (approx 30kms up the beach). It was peaceful and it just gave me a moment to reminisce generally – again, one of those special moments that you take a mental photo of and carry with you for the rest of your life.
Realising that the ‘beach party’ ended up being a dud invite, we figured that we needed to try and make our way back into town again – so the return leg, 5kms back. About half the way in we past a group of Vietnamese teens doing shots with their locally concocted ‘whatever the hell it was’, and with all the bravado and naivety that alcoholic exuberance brings, we decided to stop and check things out. We walked on over and surprisingly the guys were pretty cool, happily plying us with their evil roadside Hoi An speciality and then also proudly showing us their three cigarette burns on their right arms in the form of a particularly haphazard triangle, signifying that they were part of a Hoi An crew. Apparently this ‘gang’ was hardcore and was into a bit of scarification.
Quietly surviving the grasps of the disillusioned Hoi An youth, we rode on back to Messi’s and ended up rocking up there somewhere between 2:30am and 3:00am. The Scottish girl that we chatted to earlier was still there and the flake from Ontario was somewhere out with Mr Messi discussing who knows what or doing whatever they thought was appropriate on that night. Of course we had a couple of more drinks to assist us with recovering from a 10km night ride and then headed back to base camp somewhere around 3:30 or so. Another fantastic day/night under our belts and another reason to wake up the night staff at the Nhi Nhi on our valiant and glorious return from evening escapades in Hoi An.
