February 13 Hoi An

A great day doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it - even made time for a short nap.  Such a relief not to be herded or shepherded around all day long.

I began the day by going down to the lobby at 5:30 to use the wireless internet connection to upload yesterday's photos and journal and to check my e-mail.  The latter didn't take too long as there wasn't a lot of e-mail so I was in the restaurant by 6:00 when they opened.  Had eggs, bacon, toast and coffee and was still hungry so had some bread and cheese and more coffee.  After breakfast I brought the laptop up to the room, hung out for a bit and then went back to the lobby to try and catch Vu to let him know what I was doing today (as best as I could tell at that point) and to find out what time we were leaving in the morning.  Fortunately I also thought to ask him about the luggage and he told me to leave it in the room for the porters to bring down.  Whew that was  a relief as I wasn't looking forward to carrying everything down three flights of stairs, past the swimming pool and into the reception building.  Because of the stairs I would have probably had to make two trips.

Once those chores were out of the way I cashed some traveler's cheques and was given a whole WAD of bills.  I expected to get a couple of million dong notes or at least some 500,000 ones but was given almost all 50,000 notes.  You can figure out how many it took to make up nearly 5,000,000 dong!  That done I headed out to locate a friendly cyclo driver but not before checking with Guest Services to see how much I should expect to pay.  I found one and negotiated a price of $7.00 for two hours and figured that was reasonable as he wanted $10.00.  He turned out to be very good and although he didn't speak much English he soon caught on to what I wanted and the sorts of things I might be interested in.  I am sure that he took me down some streets that tourists don't usually travel.

Two things that stood out for me were a garbage truck that played music whenever it stopped to pick up garbage and the tiny little gas pumps outside many of the shops.  Other shops had gas in liter size bottles.  I guess motorcycles and scooters don't take all that much.

Some of the streets, particularly in the ancient city and the area of the central market are extremely narrow and when people park their bikes and motorcycles in the middle of the road (literally - see the photo) there is scarcely enough room for a bicycle to get past.  I saw people carrying every conceivable thing on their motorcycles including one guy who was carrying two sheets of plywood more than a meter square right in front of him.  Because he couldn't see anything ahead of him he appeared to be navigating by looking sideways to see what streets he was passing!  I was so shocked that I didn't even think to take a picture.  When he took me to the other side of the river to get a panoramic view of the market there was guy there bleeding a slaughtered duck into the river.   He also had two roosters awaiting a similar fate beside him. We also stopped at a book store and I picked up one of the books on the My Lai massacre that I wanted to read.

Because of the upcoming Tet (lunar New Year) holiday decorations are beginning to appear everywhere and flowers abound, particularly a plant they call "apricot".  The leaves are stripped form the plant/tree to make more blooms appear and the blooms are supposed to be good luck.

After the cyclo ride I went for a bit of a walk hoping to get some more photos but didn't see anything of particular interest.  I did however order two tailor made shirts from one of the shops.  That was noon and by 6:00 they were ready and fit perfectly.  Total price for the two was $25.00.  One of the guys in the group spent almost $400 at a tailor's buying dress shirts and dress pants!  others bought handmade to measure shoes, sandals and other stuff.  Then it was back to the room for a short nap and to process some of my photos.  Because I had a large breakfast I didn't need anything for lunch.

When I was going out to pick up my shirts there were some group members sitting around discussing their day's activities so I joined them for a little while.  It sounded as if everyone had a very good day and appreciated the time off from the bus.  I won't hear how the cooking class went until the morning.

I decided to eat dinner in the hotel rather than taking a chance on any of the other restaurants.  Apparently the restaurant where they ate last night was quite good but it is further than I wanted to walk tonight.  Dinner was seafood soup and char broiled cuttlefish.  Both were very good.