On Sunday 30th March, we flew from Hanoi to our next destination – Hoi An. Same letters, just a different arrangement! The two couldn’t be more different. Hanoi is the big, bustling capital city of Vietnam. Hoi An is a sleepy seaside town about halfway down the Vietnamese coastline. It’s also warmer – back to 30+ degrees sunshine!

When we were planning this trip, we figured it would be a good idea to have a second week on a beach, about halfway through. This would break up the sightseeing, and allow us all to chill for a while before leaving Indochina for the contrasts of first Hong Kong and then Japan. Hoi An was an especially attractive choice for this for two reasons: 1. a fabulous beach and 2. the town itself is a UNESCO world heritage site. Yes, yet another one!

For our beach stay in Thailand, we’d said to the travel agent that we wanted somewhere really nice, with our own pool and great facilities. The Banyan Tree Phuket was his solution, and it was really fantastic. For this second beach stay, we set the bar even higher. We asked him to book us somewhere that would absolutely “wow” us. He did not disappoint. He booked us into a three bedroom pool villa right on the beach, in a resort called The Nam Hai. This is the view from our terrace:

We wanted somewhere where we could chill – you can certainly do that in style!

Chilling in the pool:

Chilling on a lounger:

Er, chilling by a statue (whatever, dude!):

Curiously enough, in communist Vietnam you can have private beaches, so the resort has a long stretch of this beautiful coastline all to itself – different to Thailand, where all the beaches are public and it’s common for high-end resorts to have their beaches visited by day trippers on tour boats.

The place is massive. Each of the three bedrooms is in a separate building to each other, and then there is another separate building with a living/dining room. Plus pool, plus gardens front and back.

Plus private butler. Yep. Private butler. A lovely lady called Khai. You know, to have nice fluffy towels waiting for you when you get out of the pool. Or to make your dinner reservations for you. Or to arrange your laundry. Or your spa appointments. That kind of thing.

It’s nuts. But very nice!

We haven’t just lazed by the pool all week. Sometimes we made it into the sea!

Well, we did actually venture into Hoi An itself a few times. The town is about 20 minutes away by taxi, past scenes of rice fields and small-scale fish farming. The town is a beautiful place. It was a major trading port with both Japan and China from the late middle ages until it silted up in the nineteenth century. It became a sleepy backwater after that, so it was spared the curse of modern development.

The result is a lovely compact town full of character. Lots of old buildings, narrow lanes and all the rest. The Chinese and Japanese influences are evident everywhere – there are some lovely Chinese assembly halls and temples, and a Japanese covered bridge.

One of the other things that Hoi An is famous for is bespoke tailoring, at cheap prices. There are loads of them all over the town. Eldest Girl in particular was looking forward to our week here for this reason. So I bought a couple of suits and some shirts, and DW and the girls each got some new dresses and tops. The Boy did not partake in this exercise – he preferred to get a toy car set at a nearby street market.

Thing Two getting measured up:

Thing One trying on the end product:

The ladies took this whole thing one step further than me, and also got some bespoke sandals and shoes (?) made up:

The shop we went to has arranged to ship all the purchases back home for us, so we don’t need to lug them around for the rest of our trip. Hopefully they actually do send the stuff and don’t just dump them! We’ll know when we get back home, although it’s encouraging that they’ve already sent us an email with a package tracking number so fingers crossed!

Tomorrow we head to Hong Kong. It’s a bit bigger and more modern than here 🙂