We’d anticipated spending more time in Danang to get some work done and do some sightseeing at a slow pace, but I discovered that the Hoi An Lantern Festival happens every month on the night of the full moon, and in January the full moon was on the 2nd. So we hopped in a cab and drove 40 minutes down the coast to one of the most traditional small towns on the Vietnam tourist route. Hoi An is a river city known for its lantern making, and floating paper lanterns are released onto the river every full moon to honour ancestors and make wishes for good health and good luck. The decision to be here for this full moon festival was, in hindsight, a bad one, for a couple of reasons. The releasing of lanterns has become such a popular thing for tourists to do, that you can now see the phenomenon every day, not just on the full moon. Having left Danang earlier than anticipated, it seems we could have come to Hoi An at any time and had a similar experience. Additionally, since the practice has become very touristic, we saw no locals participating in the lantern release, making the whole thing a lot less of a cultural experience and therefore less interesting to us. Because this full moon coincided with the Christmas holidays, it was also very very extremely busy. As in, so jam packed with people as to not be enjoyable to wander around. The locals we spoke to said this is not normal for the full moon festival, it’s just because of Christmas, but even so I would no longer recommend being in Hoi An for this festival, as it seems you’ll just get extra busy streets with no benefit of added cultural experience. Now I know!

There’s been a lot of flooding in this region recently, with more storms than normal, rougher waves, and one of the rainiest rainy seasons in a long time. Combine this with the fact that the full moon means the highest tides, and we encountered a festival with an overflowing river and flooded streets. It was cool to see the lanterns floating along the streets, not just the river itself, and the pictures involved cool reflections of all the lantern lights. But the crowds were corralled into smaller areas to avoid the flooding, and wandering around the town just wasn’t particularly enjoyable unfortunately. We explored some of the restaurants and made a note to come back later, and called it a night. 

We booked a week in Hoi An, again with the idea of getting some work done and doing the sightseeing with no rush. We spent the week with lots of lazing around, split between the room, the balcony and the pool, which was very cold so I only actually got in it once, but it was nice to sit by. Creed always admonishes me for wanting to book a hotel with a pool when I’m not going to go in it.

The hotel had bicycles for us to borrow whenever we did want to go out, though out of the 10 available 6 had flat tires, and there were more than 4 people in the hotel wanting to make use of the bikes. Since we were being lazy and headed out for the day later than most, we were usually out of luck. The hotel owner very kindly lent us a scooter on these occasions, for free even though it was normally a $4 rental fee. Because of this we were able to have a couple of days hitting a few different sightseeing locations with ease, rather than having to pick one to cycle to. On one of these days we drove around the rice paddies with no particular goal, before heading to the beach. The rice is not currently in season to be grown, so the paddies are more like muddy ponds, but the paths criss-crossing between them still made for a fun route through the countryside. The beach area is still recovering from the terrible storms and flooding in November. Some hotels were completely destroyed, and there are a few just built ones that have popped up. The beach itself is very eroded, so now there are sand bags creating a sea wall, and very little beach to actually hang out on.

Hoi An Old Town is incredibly scenic with beautiful traditional architecture, but also incredibly incredibly busy. It was nice to be staying on the outskirts away from all the tourists. On the few occasions we were able to cycle in we had to park a little way away from the main section because the streets were too full of pedestrians for bicycles to get through. We found a few cute local restaurants, and enjoyed some very cheap seafood, as well as a couple of happy hours with half price champagne overlooking the river.

On another of our scooter days we visited all of the artisan villages on the outskirts of town: the vegetable village, driftwood village, pottery village, carpentry village, and we skipped the silk village thinking we’d go back another time but never made it.

One of the most touristy things we did was a boat ride in a ‘coconut boat’, which was basically a big woven bowl that we paddled down the river in between the bamboo and palm trees. I paid extra to be spun around in the boat like those teacup rides while Creed watched bemused. When I saw I paid extra, the entire boat ride was $3 each, and I paid $4 more. Weird that it was more than the whole trip (this was Creed’s reasoning for not doing it), but overall still a very cheap excursion.

Towards the end of the week when we hadn’t decided where to go next, we extended our stay for 3 more days. It was cheap and very comfortable, and it’s great having no rush. We did very little during those extra 3 days, and ended up extending 2 more. We decided to actually make use of those last 2 days though, and so booked tickets to Memories Land, a very gimmicky fake village on an island in the middle of the river, but with an evening show that was pretty spectacular. There were tons of dancers telling the history of Hoi An, with impressive lights, a water stage and intense pyrotechnics. We don’t usually splurge for these kinds of things, but it was a fun evening.

The next day I took a tour to My Son, an ancient ruined temple complex simple to the architecture of Angkor Wat, though much smaller. Creed had been before so I joined a group tour by myself. We’d had surprisingly great weather the entire time in Hoi An, despite it technically still being rainy season, and this day was fortunately another very sunny one. On the way back I learnt how to make rice paper for spring rolls, and took a short ferry ride from one side of town to the other, to see Hoi An from a different perspective. 

Finally we were ready to leave to continue our journey south in Vietnam. When we left Danang almost two weeks ago we had not yet seen all of the sights there, believing we’d be coming back to the airport to fly out. Hoi An is only half an hour away, so we decided to rent a scooter and do a day of sightseeing from here, arriving back to Hoi An in the evening and catching the night bus south instead. Our first stop was Marble Mountain, which juts out of the otherwise flat landscape and has many statues, temples and caves scattered over the hill. Next we drove along the beach to a peninsular with great views back towards the city, where a huge statue of lady Buddha overlooked the sea. After a quick lunch stop we headed to an indoor waterpark to spend the rest of the day enjoying the slides and lazy river. It turned out some of the slides weren’t open, and one of them had a 3 person requirement despite it being very empty and hard to find a single rider to join you, which meant we were only able to go together one time, and then I did manage a second ride with a couple of Australian kids. We were also able to enjoy a Japanese onsen for a little while, before it was time to drive back to Hoi An.

We’d found a wine bar in Hoi An close to our hotel, owned by a South African who used to make wine in both South Africa and Australia, so we’d done a few tastings of his selection during our stay. We were happy to discover that our bus would pick us up just down the road from this, so we ordered dinner and enjoyed one last glass of wine to finish up our Hoi An experience.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!