Shop Til We Drop in Hoi An

We are on Lisa's last stop of our travel, and couldn't have found a better place to land.

But first...

The journey was not easy.

We started yesterday afternoon at about 3:30pm in Dalat on an overnight bus to Danang. This bus (remember - we STARTED at 3:30pm) would get us to Danang at 6:00am this morning. That's a long time to be on a bus. They did not serve us Bibimbap. On the contrary, they handed us each a stack of plastic bags, which I was to find out later was for motion sickness. I was not afflicted by this issue, but as our bus catapulted around mountainous corner after corner from Dalat to Nha Trang, I became quite intimately aware of my co-passengers and their inability to hold onto their lunches. Awesome.

Lisa and I did quite well on this, even braving the weeds during a side-of-the-road "rest stop". We got to Danang right around 6am.

We hopped in a cab from there and got to Hoi An around 7am, just in time for shopping to begin.

Hoi An is known for its silk markets and its tailors, and admittedly, that's the main reason why Lisa and I spent 14 plus hours on a bus (okay - in hindsight, it seems like we should have thought about that a little more carefully). Between the two of us, I believe we purchased 4 skirts, 3 dresses, 1 shirt, 1 pair of pants and 3 pairs of shoes, all tailor-made to fit us with materials that we picked out. It's a very dangerous place here. There are many vendors in the market who have the foresight to sell big duffel bags for all of us who are carting home all of these products.

After a long day of shopping and trying things on, we had dinner. Now that it is dark, the town takes on new flavor, and all of the vendors selling paper lanterns are all lit up in every color imaginable.

Beyond the shopping, it's a beautiful town too. It is categorized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so there are no cars allowed on certain "old town" streets, and a lot of restoration work has been done. The trademark colonial French yellow buildings with terra cotta tile roofs are still intact, or have at least been cleaned up, and are now museums, restaurants and storefronts. It's quite lovely to walk around here, though overwhelming with the marketing, but I guess we are contributing to that just as much as anyone else is.

Tomorrow Lisa will go back to Hanoi, and I will take the bus to Hue, just overnight to hit another historical spot. This time just 4 hours in bus, which seems a whole lot more reasonable. And then I will fly back to Hanoi. I may have another overnight trip next week before my final one coming home, and I want to save my strength for that.