Accommodation switches. A visit from Mum. A rice harvest…but all overshadowed by a week of illness.
Wednesday 2 September
Only when K opens the Grab app do I realise we’re flying to Vietnam from Don Muang, not Suvarnabhumi. Thank goodness she pays more attention than me. We reach the correct airport — I’d forgotten just how far out of town it is — and even catch a glimpse of our erstwhile neighbourhood as we climb above Bangkok.
Another long immigration queue at Danang. Not as long as Bangkok last month, but slower. Plenty of time for another chapter of Mirror to Damascus. However marvellous the writing, I want it finished so I can start a book of Vietnamese short stories.
Outside the terminal, K opts for a regular taxi instead of a Grab. Cue chaos. There’s no orderly queue of drivers. One immediately accosts us, followed by another whose car is parked further ahead. It seems reasonable to go with him. Luggage in boot. Meter? No. How much? $20. No. Okay, 200,000 dong ($8). Competing drivers continue to argue and shout at each other. It’s anarchy. Sod it — I forcibly retrieve our bags and announce to K we’re getting a Grab. We walk a few metres to the Grab pick-up point like everyone else. Five minutes later we’re in a comfortable SUV with an unflinchingly polite driver. 85,000 dong. Relieved, we add a hefty tip.
Hotel Santori is, as its name suggests, selling a dream of Greece. Inside, it’s pure Mediterranean. Our room for this one night in Danang sports three photos of Greek islands: whitewashed churches, midnight blue vases, and rustic windmills. Welcome to Vietnam!
We wander along the beach road, settle at a street-side restaurant, and order grilled squid and Yangzhou fried rice, washed down with beer cooled by large chunks of ice. (Why not simply keep the beer in a fridge?) It’s Independence Day and the restaurant is thronged. One thing we’d forgotten about Vietnam: anything not wanted on the table goes straight on the floor — beer cans, used napkins, hotpot lids. Unthinkable in Thailand. Strange. It’s not as if there’s zero regard for hygiene: our hotel room is armed with a bum gun. You don’t get those on Santorini.
On the restaurant TV: the second leg of the final of the ASEAN Cup Final between Vietnam and Thailand. No one but us is watching. No one bats an eyelid when Thailand’s goalie scores a bizarre own goal. It takes me a while to realise the match was played last week. Given Vietnam won, Independence Day is as good a day as any to broadcast a replay — at least it would be were anyone watching. It’s a poor match: not content with one bizarre own goal, in the final moments Thailand score another.
Back at the hotel, I brief Mum on clearing immigration and customs at Danang airport when she arrives this time next week. She’s a little anxious. Understandable. I assure her everything will be fine.
Thursday 3 September
The breakfast room at Hotel Santori has fine views of Danang Bay. I’m a straggler: there’s just one other guest — she’s finished breakfast and is deep in conversation with a member of staffabout sightseeing itineraries. I slurp a bowl of noodles and try not to grimace at the acrid coffee that’s been left standing too long.
Our ride arrives as I’m chatting with the underemployed reception staff about their own travels. Forty minutes later we’re in Hoi An.
At the airport in Bangkok we received a message from the staff at our serviced apartment in Hoi An. They were awfully sorry, but the property next door had just begun renovations. Perhaps we might want to reduce our confirmed stay from 25 days to three and then decide whether to continue? We agreed.
The second-floor serviced apartment is initially fine: quiet, shaded, clean. As suspected, the fridge is too small, but nowhere’s perfect. We slip out to a local vegetarian/Buddhist restaurant for lunch (£1.50 for two bowls of noodles). And then the drilling begins. They’re not simply renovating next door — they’re demolishing the entire four-storey building with power drills. It doesn’t take long to conclude this won’t work. I open Airbnb to assess our options.
There are plenty, but only a handful within our budget. I recognise a place we considered months ago when researching Hoi An. At the time, we decided it was too far out of town. Now that might be a blessing. I baste myself in sunscreen, don a hat, and head out to explore the neighbourhood. I don’t know exactly where the property is, but the area is lovely: all billowing rice paddies and charming rustic lanes overhung with bougainvillea. I love it. There’s even a decent supermarket nearby where I pick up a few basics to lug back to the apartment.
After a flurry of messaging, we rebook. Nana, our new host, has two properties in a building that looks much like a Hong Kong village house. We’ll be 14 nights on the first-floor, then eight on the ground floor. It won’t be perfect — the dining table in the first flat looks tiny — but it can only be better than staying where we are, having our nerves steadily frayed by power drills.
Given we’re now moving in a couple of days, there’s little point building up a full stock of groceries. And we’re only a few minutes from the Old Town. We opt to eat out.
The Old Town is busy even now in low season. It’s a pleasure to be back — this time without rushing to make the minibus ride back to Danang. We amble along the old wharf, smiling and politely declining the many offers for a boat ride. Lantern‑decked boats in red, green, blue and pink drift gracefully along the river while a hundred more line the wharf waiting for customers. I don’t reach for such adjectives easily, but it really is enchanting. Strictly a spectacle for tourists like us, yes. But no less a feast for the eyes for that.
Friday 4 September
With two busy days behind us, a looser day beckons. There’s plenty of catching up to do. Although we’re indoors almost all day, the demolition noise next door never reaches yesterday’s nerve-shredding levels. Had we judged it on today’s decibels instead of yesterday’s, we might have even decided to stay put.
We extend the ‘What ifs…?’ by wandering over to Can Nam Island to locate another property we toyed with renting — one we rejected over concerns of flooding once the rainy season begins any day now. The neighbourhood looks fine at the moment, but our research suggested this area can disappear underwater during the rains.
South of the island, on what looks like reclaimed land, stands a modern but almost abandoned apartment complex, Hoi An D’or. “Haunted and cursed. One of the few places with negative energy affecting the flow of money and development here”, according to one Google review. What went wrong? “It will probably be underwater soon instead of just once or twice a year”, chips in another comment. A third explains the developer ran out of money and abandoned the project. Meanwhile ‘Boss Big’ calls it “a dream location…so spacious and beautiful…I wish I owned an apartment here”. Hmmm.
Ambling around the lane circling the island, we stumble on a riverside restaurant that looks a good bet for tonight — away from the Old Town crowds but still with colourful views of the puttering boats. It’s only just gone six, but it’s already dark. Affordable craft beer too. We sit down and tuck in.
We’ve nearly finished eating when a toddler at the next table leans back on her flimsy plastic chair, which tumbles over backwards. She appears to bang her head on the pavement as she falls. It could be nasty. She understandably makes a formidable fuss as her shocked parents leap into action. Mum dabs her head with a wet wipe. Thankfully, there’s no blood. After a few minutes she calms down, cradled by her mum. Everyone can only pray it’s no worse than the minor bump it seems to be.
Saturday 5 September
“Pulp. Good band.” I glance round from the Newcastle–Bournemouth game to see Wayne Rooney sitting behind us at the Three Dragons sports bar. K’s in her Pulp t-shirt. Wayne’s picked the obvious conversation starter. We agree and non-committedly trade a few choice song titles with him. I cautiously venture that K’s t-shirt came from a Pulp gig just a few weeks ago. Where was the gig? Mexico City. We must be kidding him. He was recently there himself for the World Cup opener. We now have something more to talk about than the names of our favourite Pulp songs. We relax, take our eye off the game, and open up. Wayne asks about the gig; we ask about the football. He mentions huge protests while he was there and shows us photos of streets blocked by barriers to contain them. We had no idea.
Wayne’s lived in Bali for years, a place he now cares little for but he has a daughter there. He’s as roughly hewn as the real Wayne Rooney and swears like how’s your father in an accent that’s neither quite Liverpool nor quite Manchester. He says he’s from the latter, but the M62 corridor is probably more accurate. He’s a United fan but concedes Maine Road was the best stadium back in the days of crumbling terraces and steaming cups of Bovril. I tell him I was a regular there in the late eighties. I lived in Manchester? Sure.
And then we’re off on a nostalgia trip through the Manchester of the Hacienda, the Boardwalk, the Ritz, the International. The Stone Roses summer of ‘89. Wayne can’t have been more than ten. It’s the first time I’ve met someone genuinely envious that I lived through late-eighties Manchester. He’s one of the last people on earth I’d have as a mate, but by the time we part we’ve somehow enjoyed half an hour in each’s company.
Photo from earlier in the evening:
Sunday 6 September
It’s time to move. The demolition next door has turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even without the grating noise, I wasn’t happy there: whatever my initial assessment, it soon felt cramped, dark and shabby. One of our poorer accommodation choices over the past three years. With Mum there as well, it would have been an unwinnable challenge.
A five-minute Grab ride delivers us to our new place, where Nana, our host, meets us. She’s in her early thirties, with scraped-back hair and big glasses. A faint mark sits on her right cheek. Bruise or birthmark? Naturally, I don’t ask. Her English is heavily accented and we both have to tune in carefully to follow her, occasionally resorting to wild guesses.
The flat is far more comfortable than the serviced apartment we’ve left — essentially a first-floor Lamma flat, but with less effective air con. Fortunately, there are also fans. It has space. It has light. It has a view. It’s well worth an extra four quid a night.
Nearby Restaurant 328 doesn’t have the Old Town’s views, but it’s friendly and perfect for a lunch of Hoi An specialties: K tries the thick cao lau noodles, I order crispy banh veo pancakes. Both are delicious. Heavy rain sets in. K hasn’t brought an umbrella, so I send her across the street under mine to see what she can find in a local convenience store.
She returns with a cheap pink plastic raincoat I immediately christen the ‘womdom’. Elegant it isn’t, but it keeps her dry. We load up on groceries at the splendidly named Moonmilk supermarket and find our way back via quiet, and occasionally flooded, back lanes.
There’s a final facetime with Mum before she arrives on Wednesday, followed much later — my usual bedtime — by our first livestream with Neil and Sarah on Patreon. After months of silence, there’s been a flurry of activity this week as they complete their shift from primarily YouTube to primarily Patreon. The Patreon community numbers only a few dozen, with just a handful of us tuned in tonight. The livestream is mostly a briefing on their plans for what they plan to do differently on Patreon. It’s intimate and relaxed. A promising new start.
Monday 7 September
Time to kick back and relax in our new place. Outside, all is tranquil. An occasional scooter or bicycle glides by on the narrow road between the rice paddies. A welcome sense of peace seeps into the flat despite doors and windows being sealed against the tropical heat.
On closer inspection, many surrounding buildings are also holiday lets. I feel conflicted. Renting from locals brings money into the local economy, but the lazy calm of the neighbourhood is surely being gradually eroded.
Stepping out for a stroll shortly before dusk, I see our newish building is the neighbourhood eyesore: one side is inexplicably encased in pale green corrugated iron. Google street view, a few years out of date, still shows the rustic one-storey home our building replaced. The village itself is old — I stumble across a nineteenth-century ancestral hall — but several new builds in various stages of completion are going up nearby. Will the rice paddies that currently grace the neighbourhood still be here ten years from now?
Tuesday 8 September
The dining table in our new place is an old sewing table with a heavy metal pedal underneath. Handsome, but hopeless for working on a laptop — I can’t rest my feet flat on the floor. I move into the bedroom, where a no-frills desk offers more comfort.
Two objectives today.
One: Scout for a nearby café overlooking the rice paddies, somewhere we can go with Mum on slow days. Le Locust Café is hardly an auspicious name for a place overlooking paddies of ripened rice. We head there anyway. I spotted it last Friday while scouting this area as an alternative to our original demolition-plagued accommodation. It’s peaceful. The views over the rice paddies are lovely. And it has every kind of coffee imaginable — plus some that aren’t.
Two: Stuff the flat with groceries. From tomorrow there’ll be three of us.
Or will there? We’re absorbed in Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude when Mum texts: she’s caught up in chaos at Heathrow on account of a catastrophic air traffic control failure. It’s not just Heathrow: airports across the UK are paralysed. Mum’s arrived at Heathrow and joined the bag-drop queue, only to find it going nowhere. It’s already late evening in Vietnam. I head to bed promising to check my phone for updates when I inevitably wake up in the small-hours.
Wednesday 9 September
I wake up in the early hours to find Mum’s left Heathrow — not for Vietnam, but for Tufnell Park. Once it’s light in London, I text for an update. Ian replies: Mum’s received an early-morning notification that her flight will depart in three hours. She’s just flown out the door into a taxi. It’s going to be tight.
But it’s anything but. She arrives at Heathrow to find her flight hasn’t even arrived from Frankfurt, where it was diverted yesterday en route from Saigon. After stewing all day as her ETD is pushed back several times, she finally gets airborne around six in the evening.
By then, I’m already fast asleep. We’ve deliberately chosen a quiet day — the sights can wait until Mum arrives. I take another early evening constitutional around the rice paddies, on the lookout for other promising cafés as I go. The neighbourhood seems a delicate balance between local homes and holiday rentals. Properties with views of the rice tilt towards tourists, while the maze of back lanes remains mostly local.
We’ve yet to eat twice at any restaurant in Hoi An. That continues as we try Red Dragon restaurant near the supermarket: excellent French-style duck and fish dishes, but service that’s indifferent compared with other places.
Preparation for Mum complete: cafés, restaurants, day trips. Now she just has to get here.
Thursday 10 September
Mum arrives — 24 hours later than planned, groggy, but all in one piece:
It’s mid-evening by the time we’re all back at the flat, where K immediately identifies why the spicy eggplant stew I prepared earlier tastes odd: I’ve heaped powdered ginger into it instead of cumin. I thought that cumin smelled a bit off. Fail. Mum bravely claims it’s delicious. That’s what loyal mums say.
It’s turning wetter in Hoi An. The next few days look especially splashy as a tropical depression spins up the East Vietnam Sea.
Friday 11 September
Mum’s first full day in Vietnam is dogged by violent downpours that blow in suddenly and blow out just as quickly. She’s rarely experienced hot tropical rainstorms and seems rather thrilled. As we catch one break in the rain to wander down to Moonmilk supermarket, Mum, like us, spots the similarity of Hoi An’s peaceful back lanes to Lamma.
Mum’s brought a 2003 Lonely Planet guide she picked up she knows not where. I put aside my short stories of the war and in spare moments hoover up its sections on Vietnamese history and culture. Despite, or perhaps because of, its being twenty years out of date, the old guidebook is surprisingly instructive. Vietnam was far poorer then — GDP per capita has risen twelvefold since my first visit exactly 25 years ago — and had only recently started climbing out of the self-imposed Maoist pit it dug itself after the war, “a reorientation from Eastern Bloc to East Asia” as the guidebook puts it. In 2003, many older folk still spoke some French, while younger generations were unlearning their Russian and replacing it with English — a language you could be arrested for studying in the eighties.
Our host Nana texts to ask if she can drop by to talk to us. Of course she can. I’m concerned we’ve been disturbing the neighbours with our unruly diet of Radio 4 programming. We haven’t. She’s come to persuade us that we don’t really want to move downstairs to the ground-floor flat next weekend. (The family currently there would like to extend their stay.) What we really want, she says, is to move to a posh villa with a swimming pool — at no extra cost.
It sounds promising. At the next break in the rain, we take our chances and walk a kilometre to locate said villa. No view, but it’s quiet and has a handsome, decent-sized pool. What’s more, a week there will give us a feel for another neighbourhood. Hoi An is somewhere we can imagine returning to. The better we get to know its neighbourhoods, the better we can choose where to base ourselves next time should we return.
Nana has recommended a café near the villa. We follow a quiet path where improbably long-legged black-feathered chickens scurry to avoid us, out to the rice fields and the aptly named Old Rice Field café. The moment we sit down and order smoothies, the next deluge arrives, battering the ripe rice before us. It lifts just as our straws chase the last drops of smoothie from the bottom of our glasses and we set off for home. Somehow we’ve stayed dry today.
Saturday 12 September
Rain. A tropical storm is skirting up the Vietnam coast, and good god it’s a soggy one. By Friday evening catastrophic rain is already lashing the windows — a familiar sound I haven’t heard in the three years since leaving Lamma. It continues all night, then all day as we occupy ourselves with quizzes, reading and chit-chat. There’s a long catch-up with Sue in New Zealand before Mum embarks on a marathon tidy-up of photos on her iPad. I end up with several family photos I’d never seen before.
A murky dusk falls and the rain finally moves on, off to lash points further north. We tentatively step out, swerving into the middle of the road to skirt puddles the size of swimming pools.
I thought Restaurant 328 might be lively: we can’t be the only ones keen to get out after stewing on the sofa all day. But no: just two other customers tonight. Where is everyone? Mum and K plough through a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc while I chug bottles of local beer. Our waitress assumes K is Vietnamese. Poor K must have been mistaken for almost every nationality in east Asia over the years.
Sunday 13 September
We finally take Mum into Hoi An Old Town. Despite waiting until late afternoon, she struggles with the heat and humidity. We retreat to a café overlooking the river to watch the lights come on at dusk. After another 30-minute shuffle, she’s understandably flagging. We opt for an early dinner and come home for a family catch up with Ian.
Monday 14, Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16 September
So it goes like this. Mum arrives a day late on Thursday. Saturday is washed out by rain. Then I’m ill Monday through Wednesday.
It could be going better.
Dehydration? Heatstroke? A bug? I don’t know. All I know is it’s been three exhausting days.
Monday and Wednesday we get Mum out for an afternoon coffee at Le Locust café overlooking the rice fields. The harvest is underway now and the lanes are strewn with drying stalks. We can’t avoid walking on them — a useful reminder to wash rice before cooking.
Tuesday is a day trip to Ba Na Hills. I insist on sticking to the plan despite feeling rotten: the tickets were expensive and it’s too late to rebook. Sit in a minibus, then a cable car, see the famous Golden Bridge, have lunch, come back. How much effort can it take?
The answer is: a lot more than I’ve anticipated. Ba Na Hills isn’t just a cable car ride to a bridge built for Instagramers; it’s a brash theme park, complete with mini-rollercoaster ride and faux Central European castle. It’s heaving. And this is low season. Heaven help those who come at other times of the year. The crowds make it doubly exhausting. By lunchtime I’m completely drained, with zero appetite and long hours stretching ahead before I can lie down properly.
We’re trapped in Vietnam’s equivalent of Peak Galleria. From the buffet we shuffle only as far as a café and I fall into a massage chair (above). We fritter away a couple of long hours until Casper, our guide, appears to shepherd us back down the cable car run, into the minibus, and home. We were the first to be picked up and we’re the last to be dropped off. By now, a raging temperature has left me so cold I’m shaking uncontrolably. I collapse straight into bed. It’s 5.30. Good riddance to Tuesday.
Thursday 17, Friday 18 September
Whatever I have, it’s tough to shake off. Constant low energy and a low-level headache are the main symptoms. My appetite also largely disappears for much of Thursday and Friday.
Thursday afternoon, we take Mum into Hoi An Old Town to buy a new suitcase and souvenirs. We should have waited until later in the day. It’s stifling hot and all of us are grumpy, arguing about where shops and cafes we want to visit are located (Google Maps is no help: we don’t know the places by name). The effort involved in doing anything in such heat sends any gradual recovery into reverse.
After a poor night’s sleep, Friday morning finds me sitting exhausted on the sofa simply trying to summon the strength to stand up. And all this while, I have work going on. It’s really not helping.
Meanwhile, the rice harvest reaches the field outside our flat:
Friday is about conserving as much energy as I can: we get only as far as our local, Le Locust Café, armed with a book of literature quizzes Mum’s brought with her.
Saturday 19 September
Gradual recovery continues. Appetite largely back, but coffee and alcohol remain far off limits. I’d doubtless be recovering faster were it not for a steady stream of work requiring me to stare at a screen for hours.
By the time I’ve finished work, I’m already fading fast. There’s a last visit to Le Locust Café with Mum for a coconut smoothie and another literature quiz, then we head to the Old Town to eat. It’s only six-thirty but I’m whacked and struggle to contribute anything to the conversation. Mum suggests a post-prandial coffee. I have to ask if she wouldn’t mind having it at home instead.
Back at the flat, we finish Season 2 of Detectorists, which lines Mum up nicely for Season 3 when we see her again at Christmas. By 9.30, I’m in bed.
More engaging writing to resume when I have more energy.
Sunday 20 September
It’s Mum’s last day in Vietnam — and a moving day. We spend the morning packing and shifting a mile down the road to a villa with a pool. Not sure how much we’ll be using it given the incessantly grim weather ahead. Still, nice to have.
K’s forgotten to leave her key at the old place, so once we’ve unpacked we’re back in a Grab to drop it off. A sweltering ten-minute walk brings us to trusty Restaurant 328 for a perfect lunchtime bowl of chicken pho.
K and I leave Mum minding her own business while we stock up on groceries at nearby Moonmilk. Meanwhile, a deluge of biblical proportions engulfs the town — something we only realise as we’re about to step out of the supermarket and immediately think twice. We eventually find our way back to Mum a couple of minutes down the now-flooded road and order drinks to tide us over until the weather clears enough to haul the groceries back to the flat.
Ian’s next up. Fifty‑three today. He’s had a miserable few weeks recovering from the fall at Mum’s and now has a series of eye injections to not look forward to. Rose is struggling with her own recovery from recent shoulder surgery. Not a classic birthday, I suspect. Mum and Ian discuss logistics for her arrival in London tomorrow, we say goodbye to Ian, and it’s time to start getting Mum on her way.
We ride up to Danang through a wet, gloomy dusk and check Mum in at the same hotel — indeed the same room — we stayed in two and a half weeks ago (it feels way longer). Dinner at the same place as our first night: Yangzhou fried rice and grilled squid again. I even swig a bottle of Tiger, my first alcohol in a week. And that’s it. We leave Mum at the hotel to nab a few hours’ sleep before she has to get up for an early-morning flight and hop in a Grab back to Hoi An.
By her own admission, it hasn’t been the most successful of Mum’s trips to join us. The rainy season has been more challenging than we imagined — we’ve all struggled with the heat and humidity — I’ve been ill and frequently tied up with work, and of course Mum was unfortunate enough to get caught up in the air traffic control chaos on her way out. She insists she’s still enjoyed it. Naturally, I hope she has. But I imagined us doing a lot more together than we actually have.
Still, I finally seem to have made a full recovery — ironically just as Mum leaves.
Monday 21 September
Mum may be gone, but we’re not about to start getting all adventurous. The forecast is unrelentingly grim until we leave this time next week. We’re just halfway through our time in Vietnam, yet I already feel I’m treading water until we arrive in Hong Kong in mid-October.
I have to remind myself this was an experiment and better weather will return. But right now, for the first time since we started travelling three years ago, I find myself wishing I were something else. Three years ago, we were just arriving in sunny Kefalonia. Two years ago, we were back in the balmy UK a few days for Ian and Rose’s wedding. A year ago, we were arriving in Casablanca — far from my favourite place, but at least the sky was blue. This late-September is certainly the poor cousin.
Hey ho. It was an experiment. I have work to be getting on with. In the meantime, we’ll simply suck it up.
Tuesday 22 September
With thunder rumbling across town all morning, we skip our well-intentioned plan for a dip in the pool. I have work, so I do my best to ignore the rain and buckle down.
The rain eventually gives up. On our way out for groceries, we run into a young Aussie from the villa next door just long enough to exchange grumbles about the hideous weather. Curiously, foreign faces remain common about town. I really have to wonder why everyone’s here. Some live here, no doubt. Are others in the middle of a similarly flawed experiment to find out what Southeast Asia is like in the rainy season?
We drop off the groceries and head round the corner through flooded lanes our chunky footwear only just copes with, to the Old Rice Field café we previously visited with Mum. I’m feeling better every day but prone to sudden cravings as my body continues to reset: at the supermarket it was a blueberry yogurt drink and a packet of M&Ms; at the café it’s a plate of poached eggs on toast:
Wednesday 23 September
A morning dip in the pool — in the rain. Work takes up the middle of the day, then we turn our attention to North Macedonia next May and June. We’ve already done more planning than I recall: what remains is largely to book accommodation. We wrap up with our first two weeks booked at Lake Ohrid.
Late afternoon, the sun even briefly appears for the first time in days. I’m not about to start loving this curiously impersonal villa, but it at least feels more cheerful in the sunshine. I hunker down with The Colors of April, my book of Vietnamese short stories, on the hard-as-a-bench sofa until it’s dark outside. Then we’re off for a quiz night at the Three Dragons sports bar.
Pros: The Aussie running the quiz, who doubles up as manager and probable owner, has a handicap system to penalise large teams and help lone couples like us. It’s also surprisingly busy (tourists? expats?). Low season in Hoi An is a relative concept. Now matter how ghastly the weather, tourists here are as persistent as the ants that keep finding a way to our rubbish bin.
Cons: Our quiz papers are marked and returned to us covered in red ink as if we were schoolkids. Aussie chap is affable enough, but swapping papers is essential to the camaraderie of a good quiz. A missed opportunity.
Despite our handicap advantage, we don’t do well — although we do manage to avoid finishing last. The question about Aussie Rules was always going to be beyond our grasp, but I should have done better on the maths question that kicks off each round. Still, the chicken burger washed down with a couple of pints of Tiger is a welcome change after weeks of sticking to Vietnamese fare.
Thursday 24 September
We’re now coasting towards the end of our time in Hoi An. Plenty of time to read, study Spanish and sort music, and still fit in a few hours of work.
I’m onto a novel Mum left behind about an American nurse serving in the Vietnam War: The Women by Kristin Hannah. It’s chick lit, albeit with more blood and guts than Bridget Jones Diary, but I’m curious to learn what kept Mum occupied here. The harvest has reached the Old Rice Field café — the bamboo bridge entrance temporarily removed to allow the thresher into the field. We slip in through the kitchen door and watch the field reduced to threshed rice stalks, mud and water.
Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has become as listless and almost as opaque as the novel, but we’re determined to see it through. We round off the evening orientating ourselves for Saigon on YouTube.
Friday 25 September
If not for the expensive-looking but curiously uncomfortable sofa, I could live like this for a while: reading, listening to music, studying Spanish. Enough work to keep me occupied a couple of hours a day, but not so much for it to become a chore. A morning swim. A short nap if I want one. Eight hours of sleep every night.
And yet we’re both itching to return to Europe. Tonight we unearth YouTube videos about visiting North Macedonia, with its long complicated history and its stunning scenery. At some point we’ll no doubt warm once again to Southeast Asia. But for now we agree we’re treading water.
Saturday 26 September
A final Saturday evening in Hoi An. We’ve been here over three weeks, yet we still haven’t bought tickets to get us into five heritage buildings of our choice in the Old Town.
We have no specific sights in mind. We buy our tickets and wander until somewhere accepts them. The first two have links to Hoi An’s Japanese community, dating back four centuries to one of Japan’s brief outward-looking periods when trading with foreigners didn’t cost you your head. A third turns out to be the centre of the Cantonese community: cue all the usual tropes — spirals of incense, koi pools and kitsch dragons:
We skip the final two highlights we’re entitled to and instead join the early-evening promenade around the riverfront. Yesterday was Mid-Autumn festival and tonight the sky is clear enough to reveal a fat harvest moon hanging low over the town:
It’s too early to eat so we do something we never do: order a cocktail. Our upstairs perch – me with a mai tai, K with an espresso martini — is perfect for people watching. The rainy season be damned: Hoi An is jammed down there. Maybe Mid-Autumn Festival has something to do with it? Or perhaps it’s time to accept, based on the evidence of recent weeks, that low season here is nothing like Salamanca in January.
We sip our drinks, watch the crowds and, almost by accident, sketch out a plan to divide next autumn between Japan, Hong Kong and possibly Chiang Mai.
We’ve already bookmarked an Indian restaurant for tonight. I don’t think we’ve had an Indian in over a year, so it’s a shame it’s so disappointing. Far too salty. Never mind.
Back at the flat, I fancy kicking back with some music. K insists I use the speaker instead of clamping on my headphones, so over the next ninety minutes she gets a chronological career overview of Ultravox from 1977 to 1986. (The things we do for love!) I throw in a final flourish of OMD classics from 1980–81 and head to bed still humming Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans).
Sunday 27 September
It’s our last day in Hoi An and the sun shines almost all day. It’s the best weather we’ve had here. I take a solitary early swim — it’s Sunday, K’s still in bed — and spend the day marvelling at how far a little sunshine goes to brighten the corners.
We wrap up by returning to the Old Town one last time for dinner, settling on a balcony with a view over the river. As ever, the food slightly disappoints: the chicken rice full of gristle, the clay pot fish too salty, the morning glory too tough. Hoi An manages to over-promise and under-deliver right to the end.
The morning swims this past week have been an unexpected bonus, but I really need to be somewhere else now. Saigon, perhaps.
Leave a comment