Day 17 - A Bat out of Hell

The next day we had a morning bus to Hoi An a little town famous for its old buildings that some how survived the war. Hoi An is about 50km south of Danang, which at one point in the war had the busiest airport in the world but hasn't exactly held up the title. Our bus was the usual 20 minutes late and was from the same company we had taken to get to Qui Hoi. The bus was actually a lot cleaner and we had a bunch more room, but the bus driver drove like a bat out of hell. The road was similar to the death defying one we had taken to get there, but he managed to drive much faster on it. I was constantly being pushed from one side of the seat to the other, which actually made it pretty difficult to read my book. I felt the same mix of awe at the beauty of the country side, and terror that I would die in a car crash into it. I just kept wondering, we bombed this? Wasn't there some less scenic place we could have dropped more bombs then were used in WWII on? The upside of driving with a reckless abandon for human life was that we got there pretty fast. The bus was actually for Danang, but since we wanted to go to Hoi An we got off in a town about 10km west of Hoi An.

There were a line of motos offering to take us there, but I'm not wild about them, so after some of the other people on the bus paid about 50,000 dong, about $4, we just started walking. We must have walked more than half a kilometer with all these motos just following behind us. They kept pestering us and lowering the price. When they got down to 30,000 dong we agreed and took a ride the rest of the way there. It's a good thing we took the ride as I don't think we would have made it if we walked. There were a couple of twists and turns that were unmarked and it was just a loot longer than it looked on the map. Once in town we went to look for a hotel. The guide book says that Hoi An might have the best cheap hotels in Asia, and I can't disagree. The hotel we found for about $8 a person included two very nice beds, Dave and Ken took those since they always shard a bed in the other hotels, and a cot for me at no extra charge. Beyond that it had the best bathroom I've seen in Asia with a gigantic bath tub and even a shower curtain, something they never seem to go in for. The room was a also pretty spacious with a small desk in the middle. Finally, even though we never really used it they had a pool out in the back that looked nice.

Ken wanted to rent bicycles, so we got some and headed over to see the town. I hadn't ridden a bicycle in a while so at first I was pretty wobbly, but soon it was like, well, ridding a bicycle. The town looked pretty nice. We never really stopped anywhere long enough to get a real sense of it, but despite all the tourism it was still very pretty. The nicest part was along the water, a river that unlike every one in China was not teeming with pollution. We passed a lot of little pretty houses including yards with chickens in them. Eventually we rode over a small bridge to a little island. There we stopped at a used book store as I had already read all the ones I brought with me. The book store was run by an American who had moved to Hoi An a few years ago after discovering it on a trip around Asia. He had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and given only a few years to live by his doctor. He had sold all his stuff and was taking a trip around the world when he came down with a bad case of food poisoning in Vietnam. While in the hospital he had just told the doctors to check him for everything and they, having no problem with running up the bill, did. They discovered that he had an undiagnosed case of some stomach bacteria that was causing swelling and putting pressure on his heart. When that was treated the pressure of his heart subsided removing the life threatening condition.

He set up this book store after that importing some books from the US. He said that once the government seized some of his books but only had a problem with the harlequin romance novels. He mentioned that the place we were thinking of going the next day wasn't that interesting and that we should take a bike tour rub by some British guys who ran an ex-pat bar down the road. We had to return the bikes so we took them back to the place near the hotel where we got them. The book store guy also suggested an Indian restaurant near where we were that was excellent. At the restaurant we saw some of the Australian people we had meet in Nha Trang, and we tried to meet up with them again later but couldn't find them. We had heard that it wasn't too unusual to meet people in more than one place since people tended to take similar paths. That didn't happen to us too much though since we were going south to north while a lot of people seemed to be doing the opposite. We came back to the bar that had the bike tours, which was run by two really funny British guys. I hadn't really intended to sign up for an all day bike ride, but somehow they managed to talk me into it so we agreed to meet early the next morning for an all day bike tour of some of the surrounding country side.