Tom’s Adventure Through Southeast Asia Part 7 — Hoi An & Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
It’s never fun to get sick while you’re travelling, and this unfortunately changed my plans in Vietnam significantly. While I was on Castaways in Ha Long Bay, one of the tour guides wrote a great list of all the places in Vietnam I should visit including Nha Trang, Da Lat and Hue. However, since I had food poisoning I wanted to keep transportation to a minimum, and I was in no condition to rent a scooter and drive down the country myself!
So from Hanoi I flew to Da Nang and then took a taxi to Hoi An. Hoi An was my favourite spot in Vietnam, it is quite touristy but for good reason. It is a cute little town that feels stuck in time, and there are a lot of fun things to see and do here.
Once I checked into my hostel I was so exhausted that I went to sleep immediately. The next day I checked out the Central Market for a bit, but again felt too feverish and fatigued to continue and retreated back to the hostel. At this point, it had been over a week since I first got food poisoning in Hanoi, and I was starting to get worried about why I wasn’t recovering faster. Fortunately, I was able to call a doctor directly to the hostel (hooray for travel insurance!) who gave me some antibiotics. While I had picked up some antibiotics at a pharmacy in Hanoi, they clearly were not working very well. These ones did though, and the next day I was almost a hundred percent better.
With a renewed sense of energy I was ready to see the sights of Hoi An. My first stop was the Fukian Assembly Hall, a beautiful Chinese-style temple that is so well-maintained you would never guess that it was built in the seventeenth century! I also visited the Japanese Covered Bridge and the Museum of Folk Culture, a wooden house containing many artifacts from the city’s past.
Hoi An is very famous for its high concentration of skilled tailors. As I walked deeper into the Old Town, it seemed that every other building I came across was a tailor shop. I decided to get a custom, cashmere wool suit and four dress shirts done at a tailor called Peace. The lady there was super nice and I got the suit and three shirts for only three hundred Canadian! I highly recommend getting some custom-made clothing if you visit Hoi An, there are few other places in the world where you can get well-made, custom-tailored clothing for this cheap.
At night I saw another must-see attraction: a water puppet show. A tradition unique to Vietnam, the show is performed in a small pool of water and plays out several traditional Vietnamese folk tales. You definitely have to check out one of these shows if you’re in Vietnam!
Next I flew from Hoi An to the capital Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Ho Chi Minh is a huge city, which was a bit of a shock since I hadn’t experienced anything like it since being in Bangkok. While there isn’t much to do tourist-wise, I had a lot of fun just walking around and exploring the city. I stayed at a really cool hostel on the twelfth floor of an apartment building with an amazing view.
In Ho Chi Minh I visited the War Remnants Museum, which is one of the most popular museums in all of Vietnam and mostly covers the Vietnam War era. Like the Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, the exhibits are controversial for their anti-American stance which many believe borders on Vietnamese propaganda. Again, it was interesting to see this part of history from a non-Western perspective.
Next I checked out Pasteur Street Brewery. It turns out that Vietnam has one of the biggest craft beer scenes in Southeast Asia! The taproom is quite small but the beer was delicious, and in the end that’s all that matters.
While my time in Vietnam didn’t quite go as planned, I hope to return there someday to see everything that I missed out on. A lot of people I’ve met on my travels have said that Vietnam was their favourite country in all of Southeast Asia, and while I can’t say the same I hope I can get the full experience by renting a scooter and deciding for myself.
