As Hoi An is so popular I’m probably not going to tell you too much about the place than you may already know.
Honestly, if you’re looking at going to Vietnam as an independent traveller, or on an organised tour ,and you haven’t looked into, or heard about Hoi An, then you probably haven’t been looking close enough. It’s one of the most popular places to visit in Vietnam. It’ll be one of the number one places on the Lonely Planet suggested itineraries and guaranteed to be one of the places on any organised tour you’ll get onto, along with Ha Long Bay.
Hoi An is what they call in Mexico, a Pueblo Mágico, a ‘magical’ town, enchanting, lovely, all those things.
It certainly is just that. The old town is full of very walkable streets, of course with mopeds and motorbikes weaving in and out of the crowds, it is Vietnam still!
We had seen the pictures of all the lovely lanterns and things there in Hoi An, and had the Lonely Planet suggestion to go there, and I’d suggested to my wife it’d be a nice quiet, romantic, not too crowded, place to spend a few days. And it is. Or is most of the time.
However when you decide to visit around a national Vietnamese holiday, as we did, you’ll find the place super crowded. We arrived just round the Unification Day holiday, on 30 April, which marks the end of the American (or Vietnam) War in 1975 and the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). It marks the end of the war even though the Americans had left a few years earlier in 1973 after bombing the living daylights out of Hanoi around the Christmas/ New Year period in 1972 and 1973. I was born just 2 days before what they called Operation Linebacker II, also known as the “Christmas Bombing”, commenced, when more than 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the region. Once South Vietnam lost the direct support of the USA it was only a matter of time before Vietnam joined up as one.
Those days were luckily long gone.
To commemorate the occasion it seemed like half of Vietnam had decided to come to Hoi An for a few days R&R. It was more hectic than the fall of Saigon in 1975 that the holiday commemorated. Though not nearly as hectic as the bus terminal in Hanoi we’d been at a few days earlier to try and retrieve my knife that had been sent with a bus driver from Luang Prabang to Hanoi (see my earlier posts for more on that).
In retrospect, I realise that many of those thousands of people boarding buses in Hanoi had probably ended up there in Hoi An, bringing with them the same chaotic energy that you feel there in Hanoi to the cute little tourist brochure town of Hoi An. We arrived in Hoi An just the day after Unification Day. At the time I hadn’t clicked that the crowds were boosted by the Vietnamese holiday makers and when we made our way through the thronging crowds I just thought it was always like that. I thought, how can people say this place is a nice quiet and romantic Pueblo Mágico?
I realise the irony of mentioning the crowds of local Vietnamese on the day the Vietnamese were celebrating Vietnam’s unification and finally having rid themselves of the Americans (though like I wrote they’d been gone a few years) and decades earlier the French. It is their country, as the likes of Ho Chi Minh pointed out during decades of French and US interference, so of course Vietnamese should be the ones enjoying towns like Hoi An, and tough luck to us foreigners! I really mean that by the way! I don’t like it when foreigners like myself feel they should have places to themselves. Vietnam is for the Vietnamese and tourism, whilst beneficial, should primarily benefit Vietnam and, whilst Im grateful us foreigners can enjoy the country as well, no place in the world should be given over to tourists at the expense of local people!
The crowds made it a bit more exciting as well, the streets of Hoi An were bustling and crowded – as crowds often make places. The city folk from Hanoi, and I assume other places in Vietnam, brought a bit of the big city vibe with them. We, my wife and I (because, yes, it’s all about us jajaja/ haha) were still able to enjoy the local restaurants and the beautiful sites of the old streets and all with the rest of the mass of humanity.
To get to Hoi An, we’d flown from Hanoi to Da Nang. We had some travelling companions, turned friends, who were doing a similar trip to us and had gone from Thailand, down the Mekong on the slow boat, and from Luang Prabang over to Vietnam. They had been in Da Nang a few days before us but, I think, by the time we got there they had already headed back to Tucson in the US of A.
Speaking of Unification Day, Da Nang was also the city where both the French and the United States had invaded Vietnam, though the latter might claim they were there on the invitation of the South Vietnamese government. The French were pretty clear they just wanted a South-East Asian colony like their European rival Great Britain who had taken over Burma.
Yes, as you may have noticed I am a keen historian and I’m very interested in modern Vietnam’s struggle for independence, as much as I am in the pretty lanterns and delicious food you find in Hoi An.
We didn’t hang around Da Nang, we just jumped off the plane and headed straight to Hoi An.
That is after we had an encounter with a fake Grab (rideshare) driver.
My wife had ordered us a Grab from the airport and had the travel phone (the one we had the Vietnamese SIM card in) in her hand looking around for the Grab as I managed most of our luggage – the yellow big backpack, a smaller yellow mochilla (backpack) and a small grey suitcase on wheels. That last part of the sentence probably looks like a report to an insurance agency describing all the things we’d lost – luckily we never had to fill out such a report on our entire trip. We did, however, encounter a few small-time scammers along the way, which we were mostly prepared for. I being a return traveller to South-East Asia first back in 1995 when I was scammed out of thousands of dollars in Bangkok (though this was my first time in Vietnam), and my wife being Mexican, so always on the guard for dodgy types.
So, my wife, phone in hand and the other on the little grey, or maybe black, I can’t remember, suitcase in hand is looking around for our Grab and there is this Vietnamese guy is waving and saying something like, ‘you order Grab?’, ‘I your driver’ and my wife starts heading over to him as I trudge along behind her with the rest of the pieces of luggage, and then the Vietnamese guy is like ‘where you go?’ or something like that, which was odd given he should have known if he was indeed our Grab driver.
Of course my wife, being a cautious Mexican as I mentioned, wants to check this supposed Grab driver’s credentials so she looks at her phone to check the car he is near is the correct one. But when my wife, now within arms reach of the Vietnamese driver, looks at the phone to check the details of the Grab, the Vietnamese ‘Grab’ driver tries to cover the phone and pretty much tries to grab it off of her insisting she didn’t need to check that he WAS definitely our Grab, even though he didn’t know who we were or where we’re going. He was practically grabbing the phone with the Grab details out of her hands, and she of course is like, ‘don’t touch the phone’ and all that. And I say the same thing. And he keeps insisting that we don’t need to look at the phone and that he is definitely the Grab guy we ordered and not some dodgy scammer.
Then we notice another guy in the carpark and by this stage Jan, my wife, has been able to look at the number plate and yeah, the dodgy guy insisting that we don’t look at the phone is, surprise, surprise, actually dodgy and not our Grab driver – if it smells like a fart and looks like a fart, it probably is a fart. So we walk towards the other guy who is standing next to a car which actually has the right number plates while the dodgy guy keeps insisting he’s not dodgy and we keep ignoring him as we walk towards our real, legit, Grab guy.
So, once we get into the actual correct Grab, we then have quite a nice drive from Da Nang to Hoi An. I always love that name Da Nang, it reminds me of the classic American focussed TV series of the American War, like Tour of Duty and movies like Good Morning Vietnam, where the late Robin Williams (R.I.P) plays an army disk jockey who says something like ‘da nang me, da nang me why don’t you take a rope and hang me’ – though according to some AI thing that I asked about that, that may not be a quote from the actual film, perhaps I heard it from the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack, which I don’t remember owning, but I may have. I definitely had the Tour of Duty soundtrack which has the only song of the Rolling Stones I actually like, why don’t you paint it black? (possibly also a misquote I can’t even bother looking that one up).
Anyway, we get the Grab from Da Nang to Hoi An. I really can’t get enough of saying/ writing Da Nang, it is such a cool name. So, da nang me, da nang me why don’t you take a rope and hang me?
In Hoi An we arrive at what we, well at least I as I was the main organiser of the trip,I think is going to be one the best bargains of the 50 Year Backpacker trip. It was a well reviewed place for only like $25 AUD (that’s Aussie dollars if you don’t know). But, like our earlier disappointment in Hanoi (see earlier blog post) we were again to be disappointed. This time the place wasn’t shit like our first hotel in Hanoi. This time the hotel room didn’t exist. Well it existed, but when we arrived at the place we discovered that the hotel we had booked for such a bargain price had somehow been cancelled that morning and that they’d sent us a message a few hours earlier to tell us that it was cancelled. The hotel people kindly offered to take us to another hotel run by their cousin or brother or something. Of course, super dodgy sounding. My wife was like, ‘if you knew you were cancelling the room why did you just tell us this morning’. And the hotel people come up with some cock and bull story. So, tired after getting up in the very early hours of the morning and travelling from Hanoi to Hoi An, via my favourite named city – DA NANG, da nang me – we are a bit tired and not wanting to screw around with what is obviously another scam.
But anyway, rather than just abandoning the place immediately, I agree to at least look at the other hotel option owned by the cousin or brother or whatever. So, I leave my wife in the lobby of the hotel conducting the scam listing and jump on the back of a motorcycle and go to this other place. It’s not that far away. I take a quick look, and, of course, the other place is a bit shit, so I get back on the motorbike and come back to the hotel and tell my wife it is shit and then we tell the manager the other place is a bit shit and that we know they are just trying to scam us, so you know what, we’re going to go find us another place. So we walk off and find a little cafe where we can get something to eat and start searching for a new place.
If you’re thinking this is not a scam, it is. It often happens that people advertise super good deals for great hotels on Booking.com then cancel them at the last moment (like the morning of the booking) and offer you some other place which isn’t on Booking.com and more expensive and not as nice. They make up some story as to why this occurs, but, to be clear, IT IS A SCAM, and Booking.com does absolutely nothing to monitor this or try and protect unsuspecting customers. As an independent traveller you can’t afford to be naive, see earlier comment on fart. And, when faced with scammers, and just generally as an independent traveller, be distrustful, be suspicious, be firm and be sure to not fall into scammers traps.
You have to just take care of yourselves as an independent traveller and when faced with such situations take appropriate actions. Firstly, I recommend looking at the WORST review for every place you stay at booked through Booking.com as many, perhaps most, or the 5-star ratings, are fraudulent in places like Vietnam. Trust me, I have read hundreds and hundred of reviews of 5-star rated places and there’s more often than not hundreds and hundreds who basically write, ‘WTF?’ ‘How can this place possibly have 5-stars? It is so shit’. Or words to that effect.
As an independent traveller, it is important to be prepared, and circumstances like this one with dodgy listings/ operators, is why you most certainly should have a phone with a local SIM card, so you can have options to search for other options quickly. Never give these guys money! Find something else and spread the word.
So, prepared as we were, and while getting some coffee and something to eat at a little Vietnamese cafe with some wifi, we start searching for other hotel options in the area. Being around the Unification Day holiday, there’s slim pickings, but we find a few options not too far away, that also look like they’re within walking distance of the old town area where all the touristy action is. Of course looking at the worst reviews of each place.
We were a bit confused by the layout of Hoi An area, it’s kind of spread out between the old town and the ocean. But the old town is likely to be where you want to be – though the beach area is also quite a nice option and not a huge trip to take to get to the old town.
So, we find a few fairly economical accommodation options in the vicinity and once we short list them I go off on foot to check them out before committing to lugging all the luggage about. There’s one place that’s just a 5-minute walk away, and once I find the place, and I find the owner, I ask to look at the available room, which all looks pretty good and I negotiate a price, which isn’t too bad, actually on my spreadsheet it says around $38AUD, so, if that’s trued, great for what we got.
The owner tells me though, ‘you pay straight to me, no booking.com ok?’ and I agree, I, by this stage, don’t want to give any commission to them, given how crap they are in policing dodgy reviews. So I go back to Jan, give her the thumbs up and we walk to our new hotel to start off our Hoi An stay in earnest!
You probably wanted to hear about all the lanterns and all the Pueblo Mágico stuff, well there certainly is all of that too. I’m just getting to that, even though this post was meant to be ‘short and sweet’. Trust me though, I can’t stress enough, when you’re an independent traveller you need to be able to be agile and flexible and looking out for the scams and finding alternatives and all that. So these bits about booking and seeing the signs of scams are important. It’s not all about getting a photo with a lantern.
So we finally settle into our room in Hoi An, change our clothes, and then we work out where the old town of Hoi An is, and we make our way there for some lunch. We’d achieved our immediate requirements, a roof over our head.
As I said, Hoi An is a bit spread out. We stayed out of the old town area a bit, but not too far. That’s another little independent traveller tip, find that sort of ‘Goldilocks zone’ we’re you’re close to the action, close enough to walk where you want ago, but you’re not paying those centre of town prices you often get. It took us about 30 minutes to walk into the old town. A trip we had to take a bit easy during the day as it was stinking hot in early May. Because of the heat, we mostly ended up going into town in the late afternoon/ early evening, or first thing in the morning. It was nowhere near as hot as Thailand and Laos though where we’d been travelling the previous weeks. But, still very hot.
Hoi An is really such a touristy place and everyone I’ve known who has visited there has loved it, with its beautiful lanterns, walkable streets, markets and river views.
As I’ve said, there were crowds in the old town area the first days we were there. Way too crowded and a bit difficult to see anything for us.
We were still able to explore pretty effectively though.
We got ourselves some passes where we could visit a few different museums and places of interest. You can buy them somewhere there in the ‘centre’ of the old town from the tourist office. I think we could visit like 4-5 museums and historic sites around town, an old bridge, an old merchant’s home and some other areas on the one ticket.
The food scene in Hoi An is really, really, really good. Almost goes without saying, but still, it’s really flipping good. Plenty of street eats and less formal places to get some authentic Vietnamese dishes at some very reasonable prices. There’s also much fancier places where you can have the same options for a higher price if you want to spend more to get pretty much the same thing. We tried a few sort of medium-level places which we enjoyed.
I can’t remember the names of the different food we ate, nor the restaurants, but there’s a few photos of different dishes on the blog to give you an idea of what we had. Just keep trying everything! Unless you’re allergic to a bunch of stuff, especially peanuts and prawns (shrimps, camarones), which is found in a bunch of Vietnamese cuisine. Be careful of that stuff of course. There’s also a few micro-breweries where you can get a decent cold beer (without ice even, like we had to contend with in Laos!). Hoi An is just a really lovely place to walk around and gaze at things, and see other stuff, and look at shops and eat stuff and then eat some more and then eat some more!
The river in Hoi An at night is pretty amazing, and lit up with more lanterns and boats taking tourists up and down the place. All very romantic, however, there’s also a darker side, there’s a fair bit of rubbish and pollution in the area.
On our walks in and out of the old town we also got to see some local farming activity which still goes on around the place despite its tourism focus. The rice harvest was in full swing it seemed and across many of the pavements outside of the old town area people were drying rice on blankets. Somehow I managed to not get a photo of any of that, perhaps I was just taking in the scenery for once.
But another good thing about being in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone where you see a bit of local action.
In Hoi An old town there’s some fruit and veggie markets that are worth exploring. Some nice enough non edible stuff to buy there as well. Not sure we got anything non edible at all in the Hoi An, as we didn’t have much space in the luggage so we weren’t that focussed on buying things we needed to carry around the rest of the world. We did have a few more continents and countries to get through at that stage, some more of Vietnam, then Cambodia then off to Europe, Vienna, Italy, Greece and Türkiye, then off to Mexico and back to Australia, which was still a few months ago at that stage.
Because of the crowds and heat we decided after heading into the old town a few times that we’d head to the beach for a day. After having some breaky in the old town area one morning we got a Grab out to the Cua Dai Beach/ Hidden Beach area. About a 15 minute drive.
On the way to the beach we passed some rice fields and a few water buffalo. Some enigmatic Vietnamese scenes which I hope aren’t erased by the continuing focus on tourism in the area. Keep that overall Goldilocks zone please! Where tourists don’t just takeover and we all destroy what we came to see!
Once we got down to the beach we negotiated some beach lounges and shade with one of the restaurants lining the beach. We found one that let you use their beach and bathroom facilities as long as we ordered food and drinks from them. I think it’s better value than ones where you hire the space for the day. That’s another very boring 50-year old thing to write, but hey, this is the 50 year backpacker blog, and I’m in my 50s, so you should expect stuff like this!
Plus, as an independent traveller who wants the same, or similar, experiences to those giving themselves over to expensive package deals where everything is organised, you wanna be thinking about how to save a few hundred thousand Dong here and there.
In short, don’t be scared to organise your own independent itineraries in places like Vietnam. Apart from the few potential, and probably likely, hotel and taxi scams you have to watch out for, it’s pretty bloody easy to independently organise things in these areas, so you don’t have to pay millions of Dong to have someone tell you where to go and where to be and how you only have 30 minutes to be there to get a quick selfie because you have to be back on the tour bus to go to some other place.
Chill, spend as long as you want in a spot and go to the spots you want to go to when you want to go to them. Have a beach day like we did. Spend a few more nights to get to know a place better. Skip some places and spend more time in others. We ended up spending 4 nights in Hoi An, and probably could have easily spent a few more nights relaxing in the area, eating great food, enjoying the vibe. Plus, if you spend a bit more time in a place you can factor in things like bad weather, and Vietnamese national holidays where the crowds swell – a little more on that further along.
I liked the set up down the beach as we didn’t have to go anywhere, the waiters would come to us, plus other vendors walking up and down the beach. The Vietnamese flag waved proudly in the background, perhaps always, there but I like to think also to commemorate the nations’ unification. Noting the very rocky road and massive suffering and sacrifices people on all sides made to get to that point.
With the beach, as mentioned in my previous post, we live on Queensland’s Gold Coast and the beaches are pretty awesome there. So I’m pretty fussy when it comes to beaches. The ones around Hoi An, at least when we were there, were pretty good though.
Fairly clean, the water was warm, but not the jacuzzi like temperatures we had when in Thailand, on Koh Chang Island (noting it was in April when we were in Thailand which is one of the hottest months!). Unlike Thailand though I don’t think there was much in the way of beach massages on offer. Although there may have been, I just might not remember. WHo knows.
We dined on some great fish, oysters, beer, soft drinks, and probably snacky foods as well, though I can’t remember any particular ones. We kept up a steady supply of food and beverages to make it worth the restaurant’s while.
I later got a bit sick from something. Probably the oysters as I’m sure the fish was fine. Actually the fish was amazing! They keep all the seafood in plastic basins in the back alleys to keep it fresh, but you know, oysters can be a bit hit and miss. I wasn’t majorly sick though, just an upset tummy with more toilet visits than usual. You don’t want too many more details than that I’m sure. But again, be prepared for those sort of things, they will happen on your journeys whether you’re an independent traveller or not.
I spent a few hours in the water. The waves were a little big, but it was fairly shallow so you could go a little beyond the breaks. I chatted with a fellow traveller in the surf for ages and got distracted so ended up drifting a fair way down the beach and losing my wife.
After realising this had happened I, and reorientating myself, I managed to find my way back to a worried wife who realised, after a bit, I was also not to be seen. Probably something to be mindful of if you’re not a competent swimmer, as there also didn’t appear to be much in the way of surf life saving options in the area.
At the end of the day there was a mass exodus of people heading back from the beach. When we were there this was overwhelmingly Vietnamese families enjoying the holidays, and they all seemed to pretty much leave at once. I think that night we decided to not even venture into the old town of Hoi An as we’d found it too crowded the night before. We’d already been there two or three nights by that stage, and plus my tummy wasn’t going that great either.
On our last night in Hoi An we decided, however, that we should give the old town crowds another go. To our surprise, the crowd numbers had suddenly plummeted. The mass exodus from the beach seemed indicative of the end of the Vietnamese national holiday and many had also exited the Hoi An area. The place was transformed into the relatively quiet romantic place you see in all the tourist brochures. We were able to fully admire all the lights and lanterns and activity on the river.
We organised a boat trip down on the river and it was really, really quite lovely. Hopi An is a really, really, lovely place.
We again had nice food, nice beer and nice street desserts. It really is a lovely spot. What more can I say?
The next day we headed to our last Vietnamese city starting with ‘H’, Ho Chi Min, where we were meeting up with our friend Fyyaz.
So in the morning, it was back to Da Nang airport for another flight, this time down to Ho Chi Minh city.
