In all of my travels, few places have inspired as much inner peace as Hoi An, Viet Nam. Wanting to escape the working grind in Ha Noi with my girlfriend, Julia, I decided to follow a friend’s suggestion and buy two tickets for a week in the old central Vietnamese trading centre.

The small town sits on the central coast, only about an hour by car from Da Nang. The road to Hoi An is full of developing construction projects, but the glorious green rice-fields still stretch for miles around.

Coming into Hoi An, Julia and I were treated to a short ride through the town on the way to Vinh Hung Resort by the riverside. Ancient stone and wooden houses interspersed with modern bars, restaurants, souvenir and clothing shops lined the narrow Hoi An streets in every direction.

Hoi An attracts thousands of tourists every year from Viet Nam and abroad. They love preserved cultural and ethnic identity and massive textile and tailoring traditions. Being close to a beautiful beach doesn’t hurt either.

Julia and I arrived, checked in, and dumped our bags in our room before going out for some dinner. Restaurants in the city have taken to tourist options and offer all kinds of dishes – Western, Vietnamese, Indian, and even some ethnic and local seafood dishes.

Hoi An by day is a place of fun and sunshine; we rented a couple of bicycles from the house across the street and cycled out of the town to the beach. We barely had time to stop and breathe before our bikes were chained to a tree and we were shooed over to a plastic table where two cracked coconuts were waiting below palm trees near the surf.

Hoi An is one of the few tourist-loved towns in Viet Nam where development has been careful to spare the town’s identity, and rare sights such as the Chinese meeting houses and old Japanese bridge stand out to express Hoi An’s proud multicultural history. The narrow streets and pavement in the Old Town showed dozens of quaint houses, modern and old-fashioned, with their doors open to welcome customers.

The main attraction is, of course, the textile industry. Tailors, clothiers, and even a silkworm house await the shopaholic in the Old Town streets. Made-to-fit clothes can be ordered and designed in a tailor shop and picked up in the next couple of days for less than half of the price back home. Souvenirs are also cheap and plentiful for a trip home with a customs officer’s nightmare.

By night, this little town really comes alive. Hoi An has many bars and night-time markets.

The night life is quite spectacular for such a small town, as bars are typically filled to the brim with party-goers in the holiday season. And of course, there’s always the local bia hoi, the cheap Vietnamese beer hall.

This town has something to appeal to every traveller, and Hoi An is definitely where a few good memories can be made, especially for younger travellers.

by Jim Aspinall

VNS