While the Champa kingdom goes all the way back to the 2nd century, Mỹ Sơn dates from the 4th to the 13th centuries. Still, take that, 12th century Angkor Wat. On the other hand, Angkor Wat wasn’t blown to bits by the US in the Vietnam War (or the American War, as it’s called here). Many of the temples, including the largest one, were destroyed in a single week’s bombing in 1969. But the Taliban were barbarians for destroying Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas. Thank goodness we’ve permanently conquered The Moral High Ground.

That history is one of the reasons we took a tour group to Mỹ Sơn, despite our profound distaste for them. When we were doing the research for the trip one of the admonitions we’d read was to make sure to stay on the paths, as there were still unexploded bombs in the area. Okey doke. Maybe a guide isn’t such a bad idea.

The setting is beautiful, with the jungle kept barely at bay. It reminds me of Tikal’s eerie jungle/ruins vibe, or Ta Prohm’s Lara Croft stage set.

I especially enjoyed the entrance sign. While I know the first part as, “Take only memories, leave only footprints,” this was my first exposure to the warning not to kill. It’s like when you check into a hotel and on the dos-and-donts list is a restriction on having monkeys in your room. You just have to wonder what happened that made that warning necessary.

The ravages of the American attack were everywhere to be seen. In bullet-pocked walls, bomb fragments, and even in recovered American bombs.

The American attacks on Mỹ Sơn came to life most vividly through our tour guide, who had been working for the Americans in South Vietnam as an interpreter. This was a notable exception to the rule about listening to Grandda’s war stories. We didn’t want them over so we could go back to our video games, we wanted him to go on and on and on. I wasn’t expecting a living link to that history.

He told harrowing stories of coming into Mỹ Sơn after the bombings, with colleagues blown apart by bombs that hadn’t gone off on impact. Sadly, either his English or his memory, or both, were a little faulty, as we couldn’t quite follow his post-war chronology. Either he or his brother spent eight years in prison for collaborating with the Americans. Either he or his brother were taken to the US before returning to Vietnam. Which may or may not have been when he or his brother was imprisoned.

The specifics mattered less than the general arc, which was that the American fucking lasted long after they left. As colonialism do.

But the what was left of the buildings was splendid. Unless noted, these are all from the 7th-9th centuries. They show their age, in all senses.

Due to sheer age, and the odd bomb, many of the facade sculptures are in poor condition. But there’s more than enough left to grasp how much character the carvings have, and how splendid this must have been in its time. These all date from the 7th-9th centuries.

While I’m not a big fan of tours, this one came with a Malaysian family currently living in Sri Lanka. On the one hand. we had the opportunity to discuss those locations for future travel, which was helpful and informative. On the other hand, I was kidnapped.

Stockholm Syndrome, plain and simple.

There is absolutely no documentary evidence that I picked up the little terrorist and carried her. Those are unsubstantiated rumors, and I refuse to lend them credence by stooping to refute them.

Cloth Shops

We had read before coming to Hội Án that it was renowned for its custom tailoring shops, but that foreknowledge didn’t prepare us by half for the reality. I counted 15 tailors, cloth shops in the local parlance, on a random single block in the Old Town. Estimates tag the number of cloth shops in Hội Án at 400-500.

So we’re clear, these are not alteration shops, which is what tailor means in the US now. These are craftsmen who make custom fit clothes to order. You go in, pick a silhouette, pick fabric, get measured, and specify details. This was exactly Dorothy’s model for her shop, Bespoke, except she was one-of-one in St. Louis, not one-of-500. Bespoke felt so much on an island, it was weird to come to a place with literally hundreds of similar shops.

While they are most densely concentrated in the Old Town, there are cloth shops in every neighborhood in Hội Án. They come in all sizes, from Walmarts to MiniMarts.

The store displays featured eye-melting designs to capture attention, but I didn’t see anyone walking around in the fancy clothes. I did see lots of couples and families in outfits made with the same fabric, which is… a look. It’s pretty clear people come from far and wide to have clothes made here.

I bought two cuts of fabric in Hà Nội, which I brought to our neighborhood cloth shop to have made into shirts. The cost for making a shirt from my fabric in the Old Town was VND 700,000, about $27 USD. It was only VND 300,000 from our neighbors, a little more than $11. It was delivered, perfectly executed, the next day. I had them make both shirts and two pair of pull-on linen pants. I know I have Dorothy on staff, but she has plenty lined up for her return home. No need to pile on, at those prices.

Leather Shops

Like the cloth shops, the leather shops range in size from Mega to Mini. They are ubiquitous, Hội Án’s second most common shop, after the cloth shops. Also like the cloth shops, but less immediately obvious, most of the leather shops are make-to-order. You can buy off the rack, but you can also specify sizes, features, and finishes for shoes, bags, purses…

Neither of us craved leather, so we didn’t indulge. But there were some truly vivid colors on offer, so there was at least some temptation. If I’d seen any exotic leather I might have tipped over, but we wound up empty handed.

Pottery

Terracotta pottery is a big deal here. Thanh Hà Pottery Village is pretty much nothing but, and even features the Thanh Hà Terracotta Park, which is an oddly named museum. There’s an admission to get into the pottery village, which is not unusual. Monetizing high value tourist locations just makes sense.

The village had large public installations and small shops. Truthfully, while the terracotta was beautiful, it didn’t sing to us. We were ceramics sluts all throughout Mexico and North Africa, but it’s so hard to bring that stuff back safely. So, (almost) no terracotta for us.

The museum is called a Terracotta Park for a reason. The grounds, which are beautiful on their own account, are generously appointed with terracotta sculptures, most of them scale model (although not, I think, all to a consistent scale) reproductions of famous buildings. For reasons unarticulated.

The inside-the-museum part of the museum featured massive reliefs, made for the site, as well as more traditional sculptures.

This is one of my favorite restroom signs ever. So very straightforward.

Of course, we did pick up one bowl on our trip to the Pottery Village, from the museum gift shop. It’s not our fault. It was very brightly colored.

Ceramics

On the whole, we found Hội Án, as we did the rest of Vietnam, a little light on ceramics. For our taste. But like Siem Reap, we located one shop, outside the Old Town and in our neighborhood, whose aesthetic resonated. That’s all it takes.

We picked up a few things at Thành Thị Pottery, but kept thinking about what we’d left behind, so we went back in our final week to complicate our packout. Which desperately needed more ceramics.

And… loot!

Embroidery

We saw some examples of embroidered paintings in both Hà Nội and Bắc Hà, but nothing like what we’ve seen here. We found two shops here working at a similar level, and the delicacy and precision of the work was breathtaking. We had neither the space nor the budget for a larger piece, which made us very sad, but we love the piece we were able to pick up.

And while the logical explanation is that these were the result of some combination of fairies and ritual sacrifice, we saw ladies sewing them onsite. Weird.

Bamboo

This wasn’t a thing so much as a guy. His workshop, Taboo Bamboo, is outside the city center, about 15 minutes from our apartment. He does the thing here where you can make a souvenir for yourself with professional guidance, but we’re way more interested in what the hands of a master can accomplish than the awkward, pale shadow we’d be able to grunt out.

This may have been the most impressive thing we’ve seen in all of Vietnam. His major pieces were four feet, six feet, eight feet long, and longer. Yet they were designed and built with the compulsive attention you’d lavish on a miniature. The contrast between the massive scale and the obsessive detail was mind-blowing.

The large pieces were incredible, and it was gutting to know that we could never get one home. But we certainly enjoyed their company while we were there.

Maybe we couldn’t have the major piece we craved, but he had smaller pieces that we’d be able to wedge into luggage. We came away with this guy, maybe 7″ long. What could possibly go wrong?

Coconut Paper

We stumbled across this little shop just a few blocks from our apartment on an evening stroll. It presents as a lantern shop, even so far as offering workshops where you can make your own souvenir lantern. These places are like kudzu in the Old Town, all hawking the same cheap, manufactured tourist goods. But, like the ceramics shop, you sometimes have to get out of the tourist area to find the gold.

I’ll confess that I was captivated by the ubiquitous silk lanterns (because I am very shallow). We have ecru rice paper lanterns in our Chicago apartment, and I thought a handful of the Vietnamese lanterns would be an upgrade. Dorothy disabused me of this notion, pointing out that the lanterns were one of the only places the eye could rest in our space, and that the apartment didn’t really need more color.

Thankfully, we found Dé Lantana. While they offered some of the traditional silk lanterns, mostly they used them as armature for their handmade coconut papers. Some of those papers just had coconut fibers as texture, but others had patterns from organic to geometric, and even portraiture.

We’ll make our own pendants by wrapping the paper over a plastic tube. They’ll be beautiful and loaded with terroir, without being gaudy and cheap. Everyone wins.

Random Acts Of Art

Quilling

Well, here’s a thing we didn’t even know existed. Quilling, or paper filigree, involves cutting, rolling, and gluing paper to make what amounts to 3D collage. We stopped at the Happy Smile Quilling shop and were beguiled. Craftsmen were quilling right before our eyes, and were delighted to stop and explain what they were doing. For our part, we were delighted to leave with one of their pieces.

Woodworking

There weren’t dozens of these woodworkers, but they were a recurring motif. You could hear their hammers striking chisels from around the corner, so they were easy to find.

Graphic Design

I usually include a selection of signage and graphic design in the Crafts posts, but the pickings seemed slim here. Still, I’m happy to offer up a tasty package of Fullo Blastos.

Hội An is right on the beach, to which we’ve made multiple trips, and our Airbnb has a pool, which we use at least daily. But there’s also excellent, accessible (to old people) snorkeling nearby, so we took a speedboat ride out to the Chàm Islands, part of a UNESCO-recognized biosphere reserve.

The Chàm ruled Vietnam and Cambodia in the pre-Angkor/Khmer period. The eight Chàm Islands were part of Champa territory, and were occupied by the Chàm as long as 3,000 years ago. Most of the tours stopped on the big island, Hòn Lão, at Bãi Làng village. That stop includes a tour of an old pagoda, a visit to the Ancient Well, where locals begged for mates, and a visit to an authentic local market.

Color us jaded, but we opted for a boat with an extra snorkeling stop instead of a Local Color walking tour. Stopping at Bãi Làng to register with the authorities confirmed our choice, as there were hordes of people debarking for the ground-based tour. About 3,000 people visit the islands every day, which is a cruise ship’s load, and it looked just like that, as all the boats arrive at about the same time in the morning. This was the scene on the mainland dock, as everyone queued up for their boats.

Our tour skipped the Bãi Làng scrum, and also focussed the snorkeling on smaller, more out of the way islands. We weren’t the only boat at our two dive spots, but there were only one or two besides us. We had plenty of underwater runway.

Our first stop was about the fish. There was a definite feeling of swimming in an aquarium, which is the very best part of reef snorkeling. The water offered an initial shock of cold, but warmed up really fast (unlike the heart-stopping water of Lan Ha Bay). We were in the water for about 45 minutes at each of our two stops, and we were warm the entire time.

Our second stop was more about the coral formations than it was the fish.

And that took us to our final stop, Bãi Ông beach on Cù Lao Chàm island. We got a surprisingly good lunch at the beachside cafe and enjoyed a couple of hours of swimming and lazing. There were even showers and changing rooms available before we hopped back on our speedboat for the mainland.

This outing didn’t really provide an opportunity for cutting cultural commentary, which I know is why y’all are here. Being in warm water is good, snorkeling is fun, and reef snorkeling is magical. Not a lot more to say.

Also, I Kickstarted an underwater case for my phone, and this was my first time using it in the field. I’m pretty happy with the results, and it will stay with us as part of our regular kit. This will not be our last underwater adventure. Promise.

We’re being more flexible now, acknowledging that some locations don’t warrant a full ten weeks. We spent four weeks in Siem Reap in Cambodia, soaking up the Angkor-era ruins, and that was just right. We were afraid four weeks would feel like a rushed tourist cadence, but Siem Reap was fine.

We’re also now splitting time between locations, rather than having a home base for the full ten weeks. We’re ten weeks in Vietnam, but six of those were in Hà Nội before hitting Hội An for the final four weeks. Again, that’s felt pretty good. Enough time to sink into both locations without feeling rushed, and a broader view of Vietnam than we’d get if we were ten weeks in Hà Nội with the occasional junket.

In fact, we’re cutting our Hội An trip short to add three full days in Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn before we leave for Indonesia. Even three days in HCMC will be more entertaining than missing it entirely. Then we’re pulling the same stunt in Indonesia, starting with four weeks in Amed, a quiet Bali beach town (of which there are few), followed by six weeks in Yogyakarta on Java before heading back to the US.

Hội An has been a lovely antidote to Hà Nội’s Sturm und Drang. Six weeks in the Old Quarter was much like being a BB in a can, and Hội An’s more relaxed vibe is welcome. Even the “crowds” in Hội An’s Old Town are a joke, after Hà Nội.

For a change, we’re not staying in the Old Town. We’re about a fifteen minute walk away, but that’s enough distance to put us in a more quiet, residential neighborhood. There are still plenty of goods and services, without the jangle of Old Town and its proliferation of souvenir shops. We’re out where people live.

Our Airbnb is a little four story, eight room hotel-style accommodation, but each one bedroom unit has a workable kitchen and a washer/dryer, which is always an appreciated amenity. More importantly, it has an elevator you can take to the fourth floor for a short flight of stairs to the rooftop pool. It is hot here, high 80s – low 90s, and I’ll confess that there are days when we visit the pool more than once. We have even gone to the beach and then returned to go to the pool. I’m not proud, but neither will I apologize. It’s easy to lean into your weakness when it involves a pool.

It is also tropically humid here. We couldn’t figure out why the weather report kept saying it was raining when it wasn’t. Then we checked the humidity. 84% humidity is rain.

The beach is a little far to walk, but it’s a fast, cheap taxi (10 minutes, about $3.50 with a generous tip), and the beach clubs are practically free. We can sit under a palapa all day, swim as much as we like in the deliciously warm water, and use their showers and changing rooms for the cost of renting a towel. They’re 20,000 VND each, or about $1.50 for the two of us. It’s good to be king.

The walkable part of the neighborhood offers plenty. We have our very own lotus pond right around the corner, plenty of restaurant options, and a choice of mercados.

There’s a mercado about ten minutes from us, and the big central mercado on the edge of Old Town is about a fifteen minute walk. There’s a variety of mini marts of various sizes and distinctions, but no real supermercado or hypermarché. We’re about forty minutes from Đà Nẵng, a much bigger city, and all the big supermarkets are there.

Less than a block from our apartment is our own personal sweets shop, Trà Sữa Nọng. Trà Sữa is milk tea, and we’re pretty sure Nọng means wattles, which makes sense based on the branding.

What we are certain of is that milk tea is a delicious treat.

Old Town

Hội An’s Old Town is like most of the old quarters or Medinas we’ve visited: a thick crust of turista atop a foundation of very old buildings, old being a relative term based on location. Here, old goes back as far as the 1600s.

The Old Town itself, strung with traditional Vietnamese silk lanterns, is intentionally charming.

Gaudily lit boats ply the Thu Bồn River, while riverside vendors offer tourists floating candles that, released into the river, grant wishes. Here are the boats at dock.

The boats were lit up like pinball machines, so a lantern boat ride seemed compulsory.

The combination of low light and a fast moving boat led to some great effects.

Shops all over the district offer the silk lanterns, adding to the storybook nighttime ambiance. It all adds up to a UNESCO World Heritage Cute designation, richly deserved.

My favorite feature of Old Town, though, is the pedicabs. For some reason they have neither horns nor bells, so the drivers holler “Beep, Beep” as they make their way through the pedestrian scrum. Charming.

Old Town is also home to some very old and completely ridiculous structures. Here’s the Quan Công Temple, dating from 1653. Obviously its contents aren’t that old, but the building itself is graceful and beautiful.

Quan Công also hosted a gallery featuring the beautiful watercolor and ink work of local artist Ngo Duc Chi. We were beguiled, despite officially owning enough things.

Hội Quán Quảng Triệu, the Cantonese Assembly Hall, fell on the ridiculous side of the ledger. It featured a massive outdoor fountain of entwined dragons and wiggy 3D reliefs all over the interior.

I am providing no commentary on the reliefs because commentary is neither necessary nor possible. There’s nothing to say. They speak, eloquently, for themselves.

And no Assembly Hall would be complete without horses and dragons.

While those two spots were major, there were plenty of old buildings and houses dotted about Old Town, offering up beauty, mystery, and entertainment, if you just kept your eyes open.

Of course, Old Town is more than just silk lanterns and old buildings. It’s also…

I leave you with this last, indelible image of Hội An’s Old Town. Just across the Thu Bồn River, via a short pedestrian bridge, Hội An’s Night Market offers up a welter of restaurants, bars, shops, street vendors, and Hội An’s most iconic structure: The Mr. Bean Bar.

You’re welcome.

Where We Didn’t Go

We took side trips to Mỹ Sơn and Huế, but there were also places we intentionally avoided. Like Sa Pa, there were places near Hội An that were high on the Instagram & selfie tours and a little too too for our taste. Primarily, that meant avoiding the Ba Na Hills.

You know it from this iconic (scraped) image:

This is, obviously, not some local expression of support for the God Of Big Hands. This was built for tourists. And, thus, isn’t particularly interesting.

But that’s not all Ba Na Hills has to offer. There’s also, unaccountably, this: French Village.

To be fair, this is a 19th century artifact of French colonialism, not a modern theme park. On the other hand, it’s a modern theme park now. With bumper cars, a wax museum, and a mini-train, among other amenities, French Village is, more than anything, an eloquent fuck you from the Vietnamese to the French. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. And we’re turning your precious chateaux into EPCOT Center, motherfuckers.”

Even so. Pass.