Vietnam, Part Two: Hoi An

Alright, finally picking back up where I left off with my chronicle of the Vietnam trip.  After several days in HCM City, Chris and I caught a quick domestic flight up to Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam.  From there, it was a 30 km taxi ride south to our final destination, Hoi An.  Hoi An was a much smaller city than HCM or even Da Nang.  It was also one of the few cities that was spared from the extensive bombing during the Vietnam War.  As such, the town is full of old things like well-preserved houses and ancient temples.

Our flight to Da Nang was delayed for several hours, so we didn't arrive there until around 10 PM.  That wasn't a problem since I, savvy traveler that I am, had made us hostel reservations online before we arrived.  We grabbed a taxi and headed to Hoi An and a much anticipated bed (I know, it was only 10 PM, but we were really tired).  The problems started once we arrived at our hostel.  After being greeted by the desk clerk, he informed us that the hostel was full.  Undeterred, I whipped our my paperwork showing that we had made a reservation.  The clerk acknowledged this, but that didn't change the fact that the hostel was completely full.  At this point, things could have gotten really bad - we were in a new city, which was completely dead at getting on 11 PM now, and didn't have anywhere to stay.  Also, December/January are high tourist season in Asia, so I was guessing that most places were pretty packed.  But, we got lucky, because this hostel had incredibly amazing staff!  The clerk called up the owner of the hostel, who came right away, found us a room at another hotel, paid for it, and got us a taxi there!  Like I said, incredibly lucky.  We slept in after our late night and then moved to the original hostel the next day.  Our room had a super awesome balcony - here I am enjoying some quality porch times.

Later that day, we explored the Old Town.  We first visited a large temple.  Unfortunately, I can't remember if it was Buddhist or Taoist.  Here's the front of the temple:

Inside, as is the case with all temples, the air was smoky with incense.  This smoke came not only from typical incense sticks, but from huge incense coils that were hung from the ceiling.  They must have taken days to burn.  Each one had a special prayer attached to it by a visitor to the temple.

We actually visited several temples in Hoi An.  All of them had special boat shrines, which is probably because Hoi An is on the coast and used to be a major trading city - the sailors must have given offerings to these shrines to ensure safe passage.

After the temple, we visited an old house that had been lived in by a merchant family for, I think, about six or seven generations.  The house itself was not that remarkable, but what was remarkable was a set of watermarks on the kitchen wall.  Apparently, the river that flows through the city floods every couple years, with water coming incredibly high up into the city and all the buildings.  How high, you ask?  Well, here's a picture of me (for scale) standing by the watermarks (in white above the painting):

The house even had a hatch in the ceiling so that all the furniture from the ground floor could be hoisted up to the second floor when the waters started rising!

Another interesting visit that day was to the Arts and Culture Center, where we watched a traditional Vietnamese song and dance program.  The instruments they played were really cool and included all sorts complex looking lap harps and other string instruments.  The dances, however, were...a bit too interpretive for my tastes.  Then, they played a strange sort of bingo game where the performers would sing a song and shout out random words in the middle of it.  These words corresponded to large wooden paddles, one of which was given to each audience member.  The owner of the selected paddle won a prize.  Not a very challenging game, really. 

The next day, we headed out of town to see some temple ruins.  The temples are collectively called My Son, and were built by the indigenous Cham people between the 4th and 14th centuries.  Oddly enough, the Cham people originally hail from Indonesia, and the temples were Hindu.  It seemed really strange to be seeing statues of gods and goddesses such as Vishnu and Kali in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle!  There were several groups of temples, and each group was composed of multiple individual buildings, such as this one:

The Hindu influence was evidenced not only by the statues, but by the various inscriptions written in Sanskrit.

 A lot of the temples were destroyed by American bombing during the war.  Our tour guide kept repeating this fact, and as the only Americans in the entire tour group, Chris and I felt pretty bad about it.  In an attempt to make us feel better, some friendly Australian ladies informed us that the Ozzies don't always agree with their government's actions either.  However, some of the temples are being restored to their original state by teams of archeologists.  Here's one that they were currently working on.

Technically, the American bombs weren't the original destroyers of the temples.  The area was discovered by a French solider in the late 1800s, and teams of French archeologists soon arrived to study the temples.  They took many of the statues and smaller artifacts back to France with them.  Today, some of the statues are still missing their heads - which are now in museums or in the homes of private collectors.  More recently, many of these artifacts have been returned to Vietnam and now reside in a museum about the Cham civilization in Da Nang (more on that later). 

On our way back to Hoi An, we got to take a boat ride!  Leaving our crowded bus behind, we cruised down the river and enjoyed some lunch.  It was very relaxing, but it got quite hot in the sun after awhile.  Unfortunately, our boat was not as cool as this boat that we spotted upon our arrival back in Hoi An:

We noticed that all the boats, from super basic wooden boats to fancy alternative energy powered boats like the one above, had strangely elongated eyes painted on them.  Here's a more traditional example:

This is also found on many traditional Malay boats - I know I've seen it before in Singapore, and even knew the reason for it at some point, but now I can't remember.  Probably something to do with helping guide the boat and navigate on the right course?

On our final day in Hoi An, we took some time to see some more of the surrounding countryside.  We chanced upon an enormous cemetery, which, judging by the dates, was for victims of the war.  The monument at the front was painted with inspiring proletariat imagery.

We spent a good portion of that day wandering around on the beach.  All the local fisherman had these little round-bottomed boats that looked like turtle shells.

 

After some relaxation on the beach (see above), it was time to head up to Da Nang and catch our flight back to Ho Chi Minh City.  Before going to the airport, we visited the Cham Museum.  This museum contained many stonework artifacts that were carved by the indigenous Cham people.  I previously stated that the Cham people came from Indonesia originally (which was what our tour guide told us), but according to wikipedia, they probably came from Borneo.  They settled in central Vietnam and Cambodia, and had many conflicts over the centuries with both the Khmer tribes in Cambodia and the Vietnamese peoples in the north.  By the middle of the 1700s, the tribes were scattered all over Cambodia and Vietnam and the Cham kingdom ceased to exist.  Also, remember how I said they were Hindu?  Well, they were Hindu, until the 17th century.  Then, the current emperor and most of the Cham people converted to Islam.  Today, the distribution is about 80% Islam and 20% Hindu.  Today, the Cham people mostly live in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam.  According to our guide, you can tell them apart because of their curly hair. 

Anyways, back to the museum.  The carvings were very intricate and incredibly well preserved.  I guess this is due to the fact that many of the carvings had belonged to private collectors and were only recently donated to the museum. 

The second picture is a lion.  I can't remember, or maybe never knew, what the first one was supposed to be.  It was sort of a shame to see these carving in the sterile museum setting, and we tried to imagine just how much more breathtaking they would have been were they in their proper place out in the jungle ruins that we had seen the day before.  But, we also realized that the statues were so well preserved today precisely because they had been taken out of the jungle.

After the museum and a surprise dinner (surprise because no one at the restaurant spoke English; we tried to order a simple noodle soup, but instead got some fried noodles with seafood), it was time to get to the airport for our flight.  No delays this time luckily.  We spent the night back in HCM City, and flew back to Singapore in the morning. 

All in all, Vietnam was super interesting.  It was an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly chaotic, country.  Chris and I both wished that we had more time there to journey further north to Hanoi.  But, that always leaves room to go back again...

Aaaaand, now I'm finally caught up on my blog.  Yay!