Tuesday 28 August 2012

Hoi An - Floating Lanterns and Occupied Beaches

Our train ran right along by the coast. When the trees parted you could see the cliff dropping straight down beside the tracks. The sea crashed against the rocks at the bottom then stretched out for miles.
Da Nang was a large, busy city with lots of trendy clothes shops and restaurants. Naturally it was heaving with motorbikes. We moved through quickly, fortunately having found out online that the yellow bus to Hoi An stops on a main street next to an easily missed blue pole. Soon we were zipping through urban Vietnam, watching the city suburbs dwindle and give way to roadside towns of one room homes, drinks stands and chickens.

A Full Moon Party With a Difference
A Chinese congregation hall on the night of the full moon

Hoi An is a small, quiet, beautiful town. Very like Luang Prabang it's small streets are lined with almost colonial style houses with shuttered windows. Everywhere there are trees bearing delicate hot pink flowers. There are plenty of tourists but a slow pace still prevails. On our first night we took our hotel's advice and went down towards the river to see the full moon celebrations where the entire old quarter of town is plunged into darkness and lit only by candlelight. Red lanterns lit the shops and temples and all along the river paper flowers holding tea-lights bobbed up and down among the boats. It was a magical sight. The banks of the river and the bridge were heaving with people, locals and tourists. They were eating and chatting and watching the river of light glow away into the distance. The smell of bonfire night was in the hot air. We took that opportunity to see the old Japanese bridge on a side branch of the river. The covered wooden bridge is guarded by dog statues and there is a minute temple in the centre.
Flowers in Hoi An
The sights of Hoi An are largely assembly halls and temples, so we tried to see the top few of the dozens on offer. Theo was the tour guide for the day and led us around the centre of Hoi An into assembly halls of the "Cantonese Chinese Congregation" and "Chinese All Community" assembly halls and halls of the "Fujian Chinese Congregation". Needless to say it all became very confusing. The halls were stunning though, largely Chinese in style they had vast dragon statues decorated with intricate mosaics of broken china, fiery-face warrior statues leering out from behind shrines and pretty courtyards with bonsai trees. Our penultimate stop was the Tran Family chapel where we were greeted by a business-like woman and led through the side door of a low wooden house. She sat us down and plied us with tea and ginger while she explained the history of the chapel. Solely for the worship of family ancestors the front door of the chapel is reserved exclusively for the dead. The altar was stacked with upright wooden boxes, marking all of those who have passed.
A dragon statue in the Chinese assembly hall
Finally we visited Tan Ky House, the home of a merchant which has been preserved by seven generations of his family. It is a spacious, wooden house with a large entrance room and a courtyard. It was full of elegant dark furniture inlaid with mother of pearl. Another very officious woman sat us down and gave us tiny cups of green tea and explained, at top speed, about the house. Marks high on one of the walls show where floods often strike and everything has to be moved upstairs to be saved. Some of the white lines were only a few feet from the ceiling.

My Son

Close to Hoi An are the ruined temples of My Son (pronounced "Me Sun"), built around the 6th century to worship Hindu gods. We took the earliest tour ever and the sun was coming up as we drove about an hour outside of town. 
After a short walk through the trees we came to the first temple complex. Like a mini Sukhothai the ruined temples rose up in the early sun like something out of an Indiana Jones film. Some were still intact and you could go inside and marvel at the pyramid like ceiling. Others were just a foundation. Much of this site was bombed when the Viet Cong used it as a base during the Vietnam War. Our slightly intense tour guide led us around and spent a great deal of time leaning against a vast phallic statue, explaining in broken English what it represented, which was awkward. Still, he seemed to think it was very funny.
The rest of the ruins after that first complex were smaller and less complete. One temple was entirely held up by diagonal poles. Piles of bricks had slid slowly away from the main foundation making the temple look like a sandcastle that was being slowly washed away by the sea.

Welcome to Paradise

On our last day in Hoi An we took our very first trip to the beach, and it rained. Stupid monsoon. Still it's warm even when it rains here and it was a lovely beach. The more secluded of Hoi An's beaches, An Bang was quiet and serene when we arrived. We took refuge under one of the numerous covered sun loungers when the heavens opened and the rain chased us off the sand. We stayed beach-side for the rest of the afternoon, steadfastly refusing further drinks, much to the cafe owners annoyance. In the distance Da Nang slowly disappeared behind the storm. We spent ages in the warm sea getting knocked over by the waves and washing up in the surf. Theo rolled around in hysterics as I got blindsided by forceful waves, rolling around on my bum unable to get up. It was incredible to think that this peaceful stretch of white sand was within view of the place where American troops first landed in Vietnam. In the 60s locals greeted armed American soldiers with smiles and baskets of flowers. Today, instead of soldiers, the beaches of Da Nang and Hoi An are occupied by tourists and locals on holiday. What a sight it must have been, to enter a war in such paradise. On the bus back to Da Nang I struggled to hold a conversation with a Vietnamese woman wearing a face mask and we watched the cheeky young conductor shepherding old blind men and young squealing girls aboard while pelting his colleagues with corn. He sat on the rail by the open door as the bus sped down main roads. Public transport here is certainly more entertaining than at home.

A storm approaching An Bang beach
Playing Sardines...Again

We'd only managed to get top level hard sleepers on the train, which I was a little dubious about, but it wasn't much harder to scramble up the extra level once you were already off the ground. (Soft sleepers have only four sleepers a cabin but the hard ones have a dizzying six.) The only problem was the guys on the bottom propped up the middle beds up on the fold down footholds. Sure they could sit up comfortably but how was I supposed to get down?! We spent the whole afternoon on our little bunks, unable to sit up, reading, sleeping and playing cards. It was the usual Vietnamese madness on the train, shouting, laughing, loud music, everyone pitching in whenever there was a bed dispute. We bought rice and spring rolls smothered in soy sauce from the food trolley and had a difficult time juggling everything about. I kept dropping things on peoples' heads. For eighteen hours we trundled along in our cramped little beds. At six o'clock in the morning we arrived in THE big city, Vietnam's capital, Saigon.

No comments:

Post a Comment