Hoi An

Woman in Hoi An

Rice Paddies

Spring Roll

Grilled Eggplant

My First Real Bahn Me

What must be the World's Smallest Apple Store

The Nam Hai our home for next 3 nights

Pools at Night

Vietnamese Style Lobster

We sadly left the Hotel Metropole. We will be returning to it after our visit to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. We are constantly amazed at the infrastructure in Vietnam. Before we left for Vietnam I was wondering if I would even have wifi available. The infrastructure here is far better than in India. The roads are all great, new airports everywhere we have been. Internet is ubiquitous. I had a completely wrong impression about Vietnam. One very happy misconception I had is there are have been no mosquitoes - meaning no fear of malaria.

The flight south from Hanoi to Danang took 1 hour. The topology changes to much more mountainous with warmer weather. Apparently we lucked out, it had been raining but now the rains are have ceased. We weren’t staying in Danang, just using its airport to then drive to the ancient city of Hoi An. The beaches between Danang and Hoi An are spectacular, white sand, coconut palm trees beautiful waves. If you remember Coppola’s movie Apocalypse now and the surfing scene, it looks like that.

Hoi An is an old trading town that is very small. It is situated on the river and is now a Unesco World Heritage Site. The old town, was settled by successive waves of Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, French and Vietnamese. The old houses are very dark, narrow and exit onto the river, so that the traders could get their merchandise from the boats plying the water. The streets are narrow with interesting architectural houses and old temples. Unfortunately this has become a tourist destination (we plead guilty) and there are a lot of tee-shirt shops and gimmicky stores. If you walk down the street and avoid the first floor schlock, the houses are beautiful.

We had lunch in the old part of Hoi An, and I had my first authentic, made in Vietnam Bahn Me Sandwich. The key to a Bahn Me sandwich is, of course, the quality of the baguette. This one was excellent. This brings me to the question of colonization. Without trying to be too cute about it the French did bring to Indo-China: Great bread and pastries, fabulous coffee, wine, French food and cute accents. By the way I never realized the obvious: the area of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam was called Indo-China because these countries are between India and China. Thailand is also between the two-behemoth countries, but because it was more unified and had a wise King, he was able to play the British off against the French and visa-versa and the country never became anyone’s colony.

After visiting Hoi An, we drove to our home for the next 3 nights, the Nam Hai. This is a super beautiful resort. It set on the sea and is decorated perfectly. This is definitely one of those Architectural Digest sort of places. The lighting at night is spectacular, the pools are enormous, and the help only wants to please you. Our Villa sits directly on the beach.

I created a short video, of our Villa. You can watch it here: Villa.

We ate dinner outdoors underneath the stars, with the waves crashing at the shoreline. We could get used to this. We met the chef at a cocktail party before dinner and he said he would arrange some special events for us over the next few days. We hope he pulls through.