What did the teddy bear say when he was offered birthday cake?
No thanks, I’m stuffed!
26th January 2020
Day two of our amazing toursity life meant we travelled about 40 minutes down the road to visit Hoi An, which is one of the most famous tourist destinations of Vietnam and a beautiful traditional town, it fully lived up to it’s name!
Now the thing about travelling…
As a groupd of seven who had headed to Da Nang together we tended to stick as a group to do our littel tourist outings, this meant finding a way fo transporting seven of us around.
Luckily there an app called ‘Grab’
This is a taxi app very much like uber where you book a taki on your phone and they come and collect you (most of the time) so when booking a taxi for four people you select a ‘Grab4’ and a lovely vietnamese taxi driver picks you up and drives you wherever uyou want to go,
However,
When there are seven of you it should be just as easy (it’s not)
Even when you book a ‘Grab7’ which is described to carry seven people to their destination this fails to mention when the driver turns up he is one of the seven. He also still insists that you all get in, this meant a rather uncomfortable 40 minute drive sat in a cup holder. But when in Vietnam and all that
This drive also included our first witnessing to traffic incident in Vietnam. We’re also surprised it took us so long. The perculiar part was that our driver slowed down to take a photo of the woman lying on the floor next to her bike; we’re assuming this is something he must do to notify fellow taxi drivers and not just to send to his mates.
After a very eventful drive we arrived at Hoi An, which was breathtaking.
The taxi man just decided where to drop us off, he knew where tourists would want to go, and he was right.
Walking down the streets was exactly what we expected of Vietnam when we googled it before coming because its just so vibrant and there is so much going on.
One thing to be said about Hoi An was that we haven’t seen so many western people as we did in this one tiny little town, suddenly we were no longer the minority.
We carried on through the town heading for the river and the centre of civilisation.
We found a beautiful Japanese bridge which was so ornate and decorative.
Naturally me and Amy headed straight for all the colours so that resulted in the best photo ever!!
The little old ladies at this place knew exactly what they were doing as the stood there with their massive baskets of fruit balanced across their shoulders no longer concerned with selling it but simply charging tourists for photos with them.
Not being prepared pay for a photo I cannot show you what they looked like, but think 150 year old woman with two massive baskets of fruit swindling tourists.
We headed along the river to find another pagoda (one thing we’ve learned from aisa is you can never have enough pagadas)
Ohh yea, the pagoda right…
And FULL of tourists!
After visiting the touristy bits of Hoi An we found food in a place called ‘the noodle house’ which gives you faith in their noodle making abilities. They completely lived up to their name and we were very satisfied.
From here we headed back to the hostel, after all we had a birthday piss up to organise for later that evening!
Before that however we figured after a stressful day of walking and looking at stuff we deserved a chocolate milkshake and a muffin each.
For Amy’s birthday we headed to our local bar in Da Nang called Bamboo 2 and proceeeded to get hammered and make friends with random strangers (or at least Amy did)
All in all it was a very long and alcohol fulled experience but completely merited us spending time lounging around after.
B
Beth and Dan go to Vietnam 