Hoi An: the Sleepy, Tourist Beach Town

Hoi An was called the most beautiful city in Vietnam by our pal Johnny, the boat and bike guide from Can Tho, a time so long ago it seemed by now. After being dropped off by the shuttle in the new part of town we started walking. We needed to find the entrance to the old town.

Once there, you can see it is very charming:

But, if you want to see or enter any of the cool sites, you need to buy tickets. They sell ticket books with six tickets and you get to choose which of the many places you want to see. Sometimes the streets themselves were cool:

One place we went was a traditional home that had been turned into a museum of pottery and silks. Many of the pottery and coinage treasures were recovered from a shipwreck off the coast. The inner courtyard was pretty cool:

There were a few Wat and Buddhist temple sites that were constructed a few centuries in the past, mostly abandoned, and then reclaimed and used as planning sites for the fight against the French. This is opne such place:

Inside it had so many statues of dragons that I would have called it the Temple of the Dragon if I didn't know any better. Maybe that is the name...here's one of those dragons (and another facing the sky in the upper left corner...):

Hoi An retains a bit of the sleepy town feel, no matter how choked out with tourists it gets. They even have one of their old covered bridges, seen below behind Corrie:

At night, since we stayed as late as possible, each side of the main canal was beautifully lit. We even took a ride in a boat/gondola that night, actually, it was right after taking this picture:

We launched candle-boxes from the elder lady-pilot's vessel: they were memories for our grandmothers.

Hoi An was pretty, and we were there, but it was fully overrun with tourists. It was one of those places that's great to visit, and you hold those memories close, but you move along.

A beautiful little stop right up near the end of our adventure...