Tuesday, February 25, 2025

We slept well at the Ancient House Resort in Hoi An. We wake up early, but that doesn't matter, we have our last excursion today.
The bathroom in the hotel is fine, a good shower with enough space, hot water quickly.
And the breakfast is also very good, good coffee, the best bread so far in Vietnam, a lot of choice of fruit, bread rolls, juices, etc. The coffee also tastes good. Or are we starting to get used to a lack of espresso?
Fortunately, Pia's stomach is also getting better.
But the weather is not good, rain is expected for the whole day with perhaps dry periods in the afternoon. And that expectation unfortunately turns out to be correct, it rains the whole morning during the excursion. In the afternoon we mainly have dry periods.

At half past eight we go to the reception and the guide is already waiting for us, a somewhat quiet, shy young man. The guide remains somewhat quiet until he finds out that Pia is Thai, because he speaks Thai well himself, and he has shown that throughout the entire excursion.
Today we go with him to My Son, a number of temple ruins of the Champ people, the oldest buildings of this complex date back to around 400 but almost nothing is left of them. Most of it is around 1000 years old.
The special thing about these ruins is the material that was used, namely bricks that stay together without using cement or anything like that. It took a long time before it became somewhat clear how that was possible. Now people think that sap (or resin?) from a certain type of tree was mixed with the clay, the question remains when and how the bricks were baked. So far it has not been possible to reproduce this entire process.
We conclude the visit to My Son with a cultural show, three numbers, mainly dance are performed by reasonably experienced people, nicely done.

Back in Hoi An we are dropped off at our hotel, and there we find out that there is a free shuttle bus to the center and back a few times a day and also to a beach.
We take the bus to the center, close to the old center and walk a bit along the river. First that is behind the market, where a lot of vegetables and fruit and such are sold. Later that changes, there are now mainly boats for boat trips.
We are looking for a restaurant that we saw yesterday, something with wine, but we don't find it, we sit down at The Hoianian, where they also have a reasonable collection of wine.
We order sea bass fillet roasted in banana leaf with herbs for Pia and pasta with seafood for Tom. We are curious, and the food is surprisingly tasty.
Then we walk around the old center and take the bus back to the hotel. Dinner is out of the question, we've eaten enough but we'll have a drink at the bar.

Written on: 2025-02-27

< Previous - Next >