Hoi An is one of those towns that every traveler you meet before you go there simply adores. It’s a historic town with lovely architecture set along the banks of gentle rivers. Its colorful, stone cobble streets are lined with cute cafes, artsy shops, and contemporary restaurants. Its reputation for adorability is well-deserved; it reeks of quaintness. But, with tourists come opportunists. For us, it felt a little overbearing, with hundreds of people literally begging you to buy souvenir trinkets or eat at their overpriced restaurants.
Above all, Hoi An is know for its tailors. There are hundreds of tailor shops here tempting to make you your dream dress, perfect suit, or a custom pair of shoes. We thought about it… breifly. Some custom leather boots or handmade wingtips sound cool, right? But, Internet + window shopping proved that the quality wouldn’t be worth it, so we didn’t bother. Who needs shoes in SE Asia anyway?
Luckily, where there’s a tourist haven, there are people who, like us, feel like they must check it out, but don’t really love being there. If we are lucky, those people have perhaps posted some of their off-the-beaten-path discoveries on the internet.
Enter: heneedsfood.com. THANK YOU JOHN for making Hoi An an unbelievable dining experience instead of a disappointing shopping experience!
For us, the cream of Hoi An food crop was the Bale Well. As Adam demonstrates below, a meal here requires construction and is handmade, by you, in the following fashion:
First, you make a spring roll: rice paper wrapping, some fresh greens, cucumber, carrot, grillled pork satay, and just to be safe, a pork fried spring roll (that’s right, you put a pork spring roll in your pork spring roll) and wrap it up. THEN, you take that sping roll in a spring roll and make a taco out of it by wrapping it with a potato-egg pancake that has two grilled shrimp cooked into it. Oh, then you dip it in the spicy soy sauce.
BAM! You’ve got heaven in your hand. Be evil to it.
On our way out of this heavenly hole in the wall, the owner hugged us, patted our bulging bellies and thanked us for coming. I mean, really. No, thank YOU, sir. Just awesome.
Meandering around Hoi An’s shops was quite fun, even though we weren’t committed shoppers. The architecture and local life is always a sight to see. Sometimes, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it.
We ate and ate. Crossed the bridge to old town and ate some more. On our final day, we rented bikes and spent the day at the local beach.
Eaten up and chilled out, we relaxed before making our way by train to the port city of Quoy Nohn where Adams dad, Ted, was stationed for one year during the Vietnam war. An anticipated highlight of our Vietnam visit, we depart Hoi An with heaps of excitement for traveling back in time to Ted’s year long tour in a country that we are quickly falling in love with.