....Continuation

After the pagoda, we parted ways with Linh’s sister and scrolled through Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor for some dinner ideas.  Libby and I came away from this trip with two travelling epiphany’s. The first was the moto, we were able to cover what felt to be an exponentially more amount of ground with a moto and yes we theoretically could have done the same amount of exploring with taxi’s, but the headaches we saved from dealing with foreign taxi’s allowed us to explore that much more in a day. The second epiphany, and one I’m most proud of, is the double dinner (with the future opportunity for a triple dinner). Everyone was touting Danang’s culinary prowess back in Saigon so we were left with the dilemma of trying to get the most out of Danang’s food offerings in three days…Meet the double dinner…it’s like a course meal except better…though in our case our courses happened to progressively ascend. Anyways back to the story, we left Linh’s sister and mother and had entirely too many options to choose from. TripAdvisor unfortunately has the tendency to the rank the nicest restaurant’s highest (which makes perfect sense), and Libby and I are like flies drawn to the lightbulb when it comes to quality food, but we had some “local” knowledge of the street food and what I like to call streetfood-lite- establishments that have a roof and some fans, and 3 foot tall tables instead of 2 foot tall tables to eat at. So we went and split a rice roll dish at our “first” dinner and then for our second dish drove out to Lam Vien-a restaurant that was in a beautifully converted Chinese style timber house. The food was good but unmemorable, but the ambience was great and it was worth the effort to try two places in one night.

The next morning we hopped in a cab with Linh, Linh’s baby, Linh’s sister and mother. Feel kind of old writing about travelling with our friend who has a baby...Libby is obsessed with him-Thom…I like his name. Anyways, he’s two and a half and his whole life he’s only known riding on a moto so he was getting really carsick on our 45 minute car ride from Danang to Hoi Ann so that was funny and slightly disgusting watching this little guy discharge an impossible amount of stuff from his tiny little stomach..babies… We got to Hoi Ann alright, our old friend from the program Christine had recommended us a hotel and it ended up being really nice. Hoi Ann is really beautiful, though after living in Saigon for some time it was insanely touristy. The hotel had free bikes to use, so we were able to ride bikes for the first time since coming to Asia. One of the nicest things about Hoi Ann was just being able to bike around what felt like a real neighborhood. It was so quiet and peaceful and just loads of greenery and French Architecture which made for a very idyllic bike ride. I was a little confused about the city center which is called “ancient town.” Turns out ancient town is as old as French Colonialism hah but French colonial architecture is very beautiful and were all painted a lovely burnt orange. You have to pay to get into anything, there aren’t any really good places to eat along the river which is what I feel like is everyone’s picture of Hoi Ann but there was some pretty good streetfood hidden along the alleys that Linh was able to show us. What was also special about Hoi Ann is that we could bike one way to get to the ancient city or we could bike another way to get to the beach, which was very nice…

The bike ride was very nice.  At night we tried to find food along the river so we could watch the lanterns but most of the riverside restaurants are tourist traps, and we happened to find ourselves at one. I was able to try Bia Hoi for the first time-beer that is brewed fresh daily. It tasted just like all the other beers in Vietnam with the added bonus of only costing 25 cents a glass. After getting a couple bad appetizers we moved to a local streetfood place tucked away in the alleys which was a vast improvement. The next morning we were in the car on the way back to Danang. Thankfully Thom’s stomach was under control. We were able to cover all of Hoi Ann in a day and I don’t really see a point in staying more than two days max, but like all super touristy destinations-there is a good reason they’re super touristy.

Well, per usual, I am too lazy to finish a single blog post in one sitting.  So, you will have to wait a bit longer for the last day in DaNang.