Da Nang and Hoi An

Da Nang and Hội An

After a slight hiccup at Ho Chi Minh airport, where I found I had been moved to a flight four hours later than expected, a quick negotiation to put me on a flight that was only an hour later and a brief discussion with a Vietnamese woman on her love of Haruki Murakami (she noticed I was reading Kafka On The Shore) I was on a plane and headed to the city of Da Nang in the centre of Vietnam.

Da Nang, located on the coast, isn't the most celebrated city in the guidebooks and doesn't make it onto the itinerary of travellers. However, I happened to have friends staying there in preparation for their flight down to Ho Chi Minh City so decided to spend a day or two there. Da Nang has apparently had a surging economy in recent years and has a huge amount of development in terms of hotels and resorts. I found the city pretty charming with it's pretty beaches that were relatively empty, small local bar scene and it's incredibly friendly locals, many of whom enthusiastically said hi to me when passing by on the street without expectation of me buying something from them or paying for a ride on their motorbike. Although the lack of tourists did make me stand out a little more, it also almost felt easier to integrate as very few people wanted to bother me.

I met my friends at their hotel and we decided to spend their remaining morning and afternoon wandering the beaches and drinking beer in the sun.

The beaches, although probably paling in comparison to some of the more southern beaches, were pretty and it was very easy to find a space with no one else around.

Me with my housemate Ethan and his college friend Charlie.

After relaxing on the beach for a little, we went to a small open-air reggae bar with furniture mostly made of rusty metal containers and motorcycles.

We had lunch a little restaurant/surfboard rental shop known as Tam's Pub which claimed to have the best hamburgers in Asia. The hamburgers (and accompanying crispy fries) were definitely formidable. The walls of the restaurant were completely covered in photos of soldiers from the Vietnam war, both when serving during the war and returning as veterans. After wondering aloud to my friends about the significance of all these photos, the only other guy sitting in the bar mentioned that Tam, the owner of the establishment, lived in an American army camp during the war and had lots of stories to tell, recommending that we speak to her if we have the chance.

Sure enough, when Tam came with our food orders, she sat down with us and started to recount various tales. She told us of how when she was fourteen, her family was very short of money and she started looking for work in order to help provide for her younger siblings, so that they might be able to get an education. Tam soon found business in dealing with the Americans who were staying nearby Da Nang. She soon found that the soldiers were tired of drinking lukewarm beer and, after a few failed attempts where she slid down the muddy sides of the mountain, started bringing up huge blocks of ice to sell for the soldiers. She soon branched out to other goods, using techniques like hiding them in a hollowed out watermelon and made a healthy sum of money for herself. She told us how she started to learn English through her connections to the soldiers and soon found employment in a nearby hospital where she helped translate between the military doctors and the locals. One of her stories explained how many locals were initially extremely reluctant to be sent to the hospital and insisted how they would be fine on their own. However, after the first few locals tested out the hospital, and experienced the luxury of multiple meals a day and a warm bed, they were soon lining up with invented illnesses in the hope of being able to spend a night or two at a hospital.

In more recent times, Tam has been running her pub in the city and providing tours of historic war sites to interested tourists and returning veterans in original models of jeeps used during the war (although she is now unable to find replacement parts for the jeeps and has mostly stopped doing this). She has also had entrepreneurial ventures with various villages in the rural mountains who she has helped set up trade with and encouraged to become more self sustainable by providing baby pigs for them to nurse to adulthood and sell for large profits.

After talking for a while with Tam, she asked if we were busy the next day and suggested she take us to see the remains of the army base where she had lived at for a few months during the war. Fortunately, my itinerary was pretty flexible and unplanned and I was able to take her up on the offer.

The next day at noon, I returned and was whisked away on the back of Tam's motorbike into the mountains. Tam proudly stated how many tour guides offered tours of war sites but that none of them knew of this particular camp, making it essentially her little secret.

All that remained of the base was a small concrete building and the stone sign with the faint imprint of the camp's name and it's insignia. 

Tam near the remains of the army camp.

After seeing the camp, we headed into the city, where Tam treated me to her favourite dish Da Nang dish, Mì Quảng, which consists of rice noodles topped with fresh herbs, chilis, rice crackers, peanuts, pork and shrimp. Despite having offered me a free trip to the base, she refused to let me pay!

We returned to her pub, where she told me a little bit more about the history of Da Nang and the war and showed me a picture of Camp Reasoner in it's original incarnation (American soldiers and all).

The camp back in the war.

She then told me not to leave until she was back from the kitchen and disappeared to the kitchen for thirty minutes. She returned with a bag labeled 'Happy New Year' which contained one of her huge signature burgers and fries wrapped in foil for when I got hungry on the road to Hoi An. She again refused to let me pay for this, insisting it was a present for the New Year.

The burger was devoured a few hours later

I really couldn't get over the kindness she'd shown to me in taking me on the tour and providing me with a number of free meals as well as the amazing stories that she was so willing to share. Clearly she's left an impression on quite a few people-the surfboards she was renting out had all been donated to her (at a significant cost) by previous visitors to the pub who were also taken in by her friendliness and hospitality. If anyone reading this does make their way to Da Nang, I sincerely recommend you give Tam's Pub a visit and get to know Tam for yourself!

After leaving Tam's Pub, I headed to Hoi An, which lay forty or so minutes to the south.

Hoi An is one of Vietnam's most popular cities for both local and foreign tourists alike. The town was left completely intact from the war and is notable for it's beautiful riverside old town which is filled with beautiful historic buildings from the past few hundred years. The city is now a mecca for tourists who come for it's plethora of tailor's, restaurants and cooking courses.

The city also had a huge number of middle aged women, all dressed identically in patterned trousers and conical hats, selling a variety of tropical fruits.

The architecture was beautiful, and its weathered exteriors gave a really nice atmosphere to the town.

Hoi An is also located next to a small river, and tourists can take small boat trips along the river, either on large boats like this, or smaller canoes paddled by conical hat wearing locals.

The bridge crossing the river was decked out in New Year's ornaments.

Happy Year of the Monkey!

As the sun began to set, a number of small lanterns started floating down the river.

I headed to an outdoor restaurant called Ba Le Well with some people from the hostel. The restaurant was highly recommended by a number of websites and tour books, but still had a very local vibe and it felt like it catered to just as many Vietnamese people as it did international tourists. I was again overwhelmed with the amount of food placed in front of me here! We were brought huge plates of vegetables and herbs (the norm in many Vietnamese restaurants), some fried spring rolls, Kimchi, grilled meat sticks and Bánh Xèo (crispy Turmeric pancakes stuffed with shrimp and pork). The whole meal came with a pile of rice paper which you were meant to wrap around whatever you ate to keep it neat and contained. The food was delicious and despite the huge quantity, still own cost around five US dollars!

Hoi An is considered by some to be the food capital of Vietnam, and has hundreds of cooking courses on offer by the huge array of restaurants that dot its streets. I signed up for one of the bigger cooking courses at a place called Morning Glory Street Food Restaurant.

The course started with a short boat ride to the market where we were given a little tour of Ha Noi's huge wet market.

The tour was ok, although felt a little gratuitous as we weren't given much information about what was going on. I did however learn how to tell the difference between female and male crabs by the apron on their underside.

The market also offered plenty of opportunities to to photograph vendors wearing their typical conical hats. Our tour guide told us that the vendors were all women as apparently women are better at negotiating prices than the men...

Some elaborate carved ginger.

A woman making some rice noodles.

After the tour, we headed to the street food restaurant, which consisted of a huge food hall that had a bunch of different counters with food being freshly prepared and displayed. We were given a tour of the food hall, and got to see both how they made the food and try samples of it all ourselves. This was actually one of my highlights of Vietnam, as the food I tried was some of the best I had on my trip! I don't exactly know what many of the different things we had were called, but they included these interesting tiny rice noodle baskets, tapioca dumplings and small bitesized fried things.

A man making white roses (a kind of shrimp dumpling), one of Hoi An's most famous dishes.

A team of chefs preparing 'Cau Lao', another one of Hoi An's most famous dishes, with a focus and speed that reminded me of the xiaolongbao chef's at Taipei's own Din Tai Fung.

This woman was also making little rice noodle baskets that were in one of the snacks that we'd tried. 

Our group were all given a chance to try for ourselves and it turned out being much harder than it looked!

You had to quickly push the strings of noodles as they came out to the right and then to the left before breaking them off, putting them on the plate below and starting again. The first one or two were easy, but the fast pace meant that if you stalled for one second then the whole process would be ruined as the noodles came out at a pretty fast pace.

The end of the tour involved going to the counters with more unusual foods...

including jellyfish salad, silkworm salad, 

spicy tiny snails, and pigs brain (not pictured).

It was here that it became apparent to what extent Asia had weathered away my squeamishness about food and I tried all the things that were offered. The jellyfish and silkworm were inoffensive  enough, and put on crackers with enough other things that it wasn't really obvious what you were eating. The snails were actually really delicious and just tasted strongly of lemongrass and chilli.

The brain unfortunately looked exactly like brain and it was difficult to pluck up the courage to swallow the small chunk on my spoon. The texture was very soft, but I wasn't really able to get an impression of the flavour as the fact that it was brain and that I wanted to be eating it for as short a time as possible sort of distracted me from the details.


After this tour we headed upstairs to do the class. There were several rows of counters with ingredients set up with a big demonstration counter at the front of the room, with a magnifying mirror hanging above so you could see exactly what the chef was doing. I'd read that this particular cooking school can feel a little impersonal due to the set up of the class and the maximum class numbers of thirty people. Fortunately, the group was very small (there must have been less than ten of us), so I didn't have this problem, but could definitely imagine that it would be less fun in a much bigger group.

The first dish we made was a minced shrimp and cabbage spring roll (the cabbage worked as the wrapper of the spring roll) in a vegetable broth.

The rolls were easier than they look to roll (in part because the cabbage had all been cut into uniform flat squares for us) and the soup ended up being really delicious with a lot of subtle flavours.

Our second dish was bánh xèo, or vietnamese pancake. This involved frying a small piece of pork and shrimp in a healthy dollop of oil before covering it with a turmeric flavoured pancake batter and frying it until incredibly crispy. When the pancake was ready, we took it out and wrapped it in a square of rice paper (this apparently keeps your hands from getting greasy from the pancake), eating it with some fish sauce (which we saw how to make at the front, although didn't get the opportunity to make ourselves).

Finally, we had a grilled chicken dish with a papaya salad to finish off the class. We were each given a stick with a different vegetable on the end to identify whose was whose. We also had a huge tray of spices, such as lemon leaves, lemongrass, fish sauce and chilli (see below) which we then put onto the chicken to marinade it before putting it on our sticks.


The plate of spices that was brought to our counter.

After finishing the marinade, we worked on the mango salad. Vietnam seems to have to ways of eating fruits like mangos and papayas. You can either eat them as deserts when fully soft and ripened, or eat them when they're still crispy and green as part of a salad. We started by cutting down the mango vertically all around the mango, leaving about 1 cm in between each cut. We then used a special peeler (later given to us as a gift) to peel off the thin slices of mango. We mixed this mango with some dressing, fresh herbs and crispy onion flakes.

This course was definitely my favourite of the three. The salad was crunchy and fresh and the marinade of the chicken tasted unbelievably good and is definitely something I'll be making again.

After the cooking course, I had more of a wander around Hoi An to get a better feel for the city.

On my way, I passed by this shop where handmade lanterns were being made.

There were also a number of little stands selling watermelons that had really intricate and beautiful patterns sketched out on them.


I also passed by hundreds of tailors selling a variety of funky suits and dresses. One of Hoi An's most famous characteristics is its abundancy of tailor's, all who offer high quality clothing making at very reasonable prices.

Even though I hadn't really stopped eating since the morning, I was determined to make the most of Hoi An's reputation as Vietnam's culinary centre. I'd read in numerous places about a restaurant called 'The Bánh mì Queen', which people claimed to have the best Bánh mì (the Vietnamese baguette sandwiches) in the whole of the country.



I'd already developed a taste for Bánh Mì, which could be found for about 1 US dollar on pretty much any street corner and consisted of pate, some kind of cold meet, fresh herbs and sauce.




Despite it's prominence amongst tourists, the Bánh mì Queen was situated a very humble building which just consisted of the sandwich stand at the front and a few basic tables and chairs in the room behind it. Ordering consisted of the owner asking you if you wanted 'everything' while pointing to the array of ingredients laid out in front of her, to which I of course answered 'yes'.

Although I'd had a few Bánh mì on my trip so far, I was completely blown away by the quality of this one. The sandwich consisted of warm and crispy bread, pate, pork, fried egg, fresh herbs, carrots, papaya, and a really delicious spicy sauce (which I think was what made the sandwich so good). The sandwich was also very reasonably priced at only 20,000 Dong (1 dollar), which apparently can be haggled down to the local price. The sandwich was so good and affordable that I made sure I went back the next day before leaving.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around the markets and alleys of the town before heading back to the hostel.

Later that night, I convinced some people from the hostel to go with me to a restaurant owned by the same person who'd set up the cooking course I went to in the morning (the owner, Vy, seems to own quite a few well regarded restaurants in the area). The restaurant specialised in the Hoi An's local specialties, Cao lầu and White Rose dumplings, and also was very reasonably priced considering its upmarket feel, costing around five dollars for everything together.

Cao lầu is a local specialty made of barbecued pork, noodles, herbs and chili and croutons. Apparently the noodles can only be made with water from the Ba Le well in Hoi An, which is mixed with ash before being used to make the noodles.

White rose dumplings, or Banh Bao Vac, are another apparent 'must have' in Hoi An and are named for the way in which the dough is wrapped around the open ball of ground shrimp in the middle. The dumplings were topped with crispy fried onions and could be dipped in the ubiquitous fish sauce.

The next morning I had the ambitious plan of joining a 'sunrise tour' of the neighbouring My Son temples, which apparently are best visited in the very early hours to avoid the swarms of tourists that would come there. My Son Temple is a ruined Hindu Temple, partially destroyed by the war and covered in moss and other vegetation. The tour guide told me to be outside my hotel for 5:00am for pick up. Unfortunately, all the traveling had been tiring me out and rising at that hour was a bit of a struggle. I managed to make it down to the hostel for 5:10, but after waiting for a while, it became apparent that I'd missed the bus and would not be seeing the temple.

Nevertheless, this gave me the opportunity to sleep a little more and also revisit the Banh Mi Queen.

I went for one last walk around the city.

And paid a visit to the Japanese covered bridge, first built in the late 16th century, although the current incarnation is much newer than that.

I also went to check out a small second hand book store which was recommended by my Lonely Planet. Although the bookstore was a pretty interesting place, I was disappointed to find that a lot of the books that I was interested in reading (a variety of famous novels set in Vietnam) were all really obvious fake copies.

After browsing the bookstore for a little, I headed back to my hostel to wait for a bus I'd booked to the imperial city of Hue in the north. Determined not to miss this bus, I gave myself plenty of time (the bus too decided to be about forty five minutes late), and soon I was on my way out of Hoi An and on to my next destination.