Wednesday

(I'm still talking about our recent Valentine's Day trip. This is a sequel to the post preceding it.) We flew into Đà Nẵng after sunset on Friday the thirteenth, and hailed a cab south to Hội An. The driver tried to take us to the wrong hotel, but in all fairness the wrong place really did have virtually the same name as the one we'd booked. Still being fair: he only very mildly overcharged us, too. The right hotel was a lush courtyard affair on the palm- and paddy-lined riverbank between the town and the beach. Since it was already late we didn't see either until the next day. Both are beautiful. We've discovered yet again that we are not altogether typical tourists. Or maybe we are just really bad at tourism. Hội An is dotted with two-hundred year old traditional Chinese houses, traditional Chinese and Japanese temples, Museums explaining the interesting history and long-arrested nature of the place. We didn't do any of that. We spent our few days buying handmade shoes and clothing, eating and drinking in interesting modern fusion joints inhabiting century-old buildings overlooking the muddy river, and just soaking in the kind of bizarre juxtapositions that occur when a genuine and modern population inhabits a fetchingly preposterous and frozen historical space. Well, we did rent a guided tour of the nearby Champa ruins at Mỹ Sơn on that very hot Sunday. An air conditioned car operated by the hotel whisked us away first thing in the morning to the site, through several of the small towns that dot the Quảng Nam Province countryside. At Mỹ Sơn we wandered around the crumbling remains of fourteen-hundred year old buildings before returning to Hội An for passion fruit martinis in a riverside Mexican restaurant later that afternoon. [Cavin]