Hoi An, Vietnam
JANUARY 4, 2001
Started to take the rather long bus south. It was a full 16 hours from Hanoi to Hue. Hue was much different. The touts (who offer to drive you places) follow you around from they see you to the time you find some cover at a hotel or tourist site or wherever. I tried walking around the town with a German traveler, but we were constantly being followed by several locals offering to take us places for a dollar. It made it hard to look around. They were confined to the road because of their vehicles, so we'd go through parks and such to stop their following, but once we were on the other side, there were always a brand new set of them who'd see us and chase us down the street, asking to take us places. Kind of exhausting place. The town itself was nice enough with a huge river. I didn't care too much for Hue though, so the next day, I was on the next bus out of that town.
The next day I was on my way to Hoi An. It turned out to be a beautiful port town. The architecture was completely different, mostly chinese influence. Most of the walls had moss on them, and I heard that during the rainy season, the moss grows really thick, and the city has a bright green look which is really beautiful. Also, there were hundreds of personal tailors making just about any kind of cloth into clothing that you could imagine. It was actually really nice place.
Between the two towns, we went through Danang, the third largest town in Vietnam. It was a really dirty place, and I was surprised that so many Vietnamese women could wear their traditional ao dao uniforms, and they seemed to favor the white colors in this town. I was wondering how they could ever keep their ao dao so white with so much mud and dirt and dust everywhere.
Also, nearly everytime we stopped anywhere along the roads, we were swarmed by little kids and adults selling soda, water, snacks, postcards, and just about everything you can imagine. Such a strange sales tactic, to bring everything to you. The foreigners, myself included, became extremely immune to it after awhile, or extremely irritated by it. People would just snap 'no, no, no, no, no' as person after person after person would ask 'you buy mister?'
Some interesting things on the Vietnam road. The transport of pigs was one of the more interesting ones. Each pig gets his own see-through basket which he is placed in. Then they are stacked high on the back of trucks, sometimes 7-8 rows on top of each other. They can't move either, because the baskets are just big enough to enclose them, but not much else. There are lots of holes in them, so breathing isn't bad, but it must be real uncomfortable to be stacked like that. These are live pigs.
Also, road rules in Vietnam are extremely intersting. Basically the largest vehicles can do whatever it wants, and all the thousands of bikes everywhere have to go around it. Interesting system. Actually I began to kind of enjoy travelling in Vietnam. But so many obstacles and everyone and everything in the road.
Read the Next Journal Entry in Nha Trang, Vietnam:
January 6, 2001
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