This morning myself and Laura decided to get a scooter and head up along the coast of Hoi An. We went from shop to shop looking for the perfect scooter as most places only rented powerful motor bikes which kind of scared us. Eventually we found the cutest little blue scooter and we were delighted with it. The lady informed us that it was an electric scooter but that this wouldn't be a problem so off we went, laura doing the driving with me her pretty lady on the back, the dream team!! The scooter was fairly slow I have to say! we were going no faster than 30 mph but we agreed this wasn't a bad thing as it meant we would be pretty safe plus it gave us a chance to fully enjoy the scenery, delightful!!
About 20 minutes into our exploration the adorable scooter started to lose power, it was so funny. Laura would accelerate we would move about 3 meters at 5mph, Laura would accelerate again, we would move another 3 mph and so on. Literally children on bicycles were passing us out. I laughed so much, as Laura said there are good disasters and bad disasters and this was definitely a good one. Although annoying after a while we agreed that we would soon look back and laugh and I already am. It was so entertaining!
Eventually we got to a dead end and a Vietnamese man came over to see what the story was with our dodgy scooter. He and his friends had a good laugh at it and even drove it around but he was kind enough to call the rental company for us and they headed out to meet us with a new scooter.
While we waited we sat with the Vietnamese men for a while, it's funny cause almost always one of the first questions we get asked when speaking to Vietnamese people is our age, a question that is very daring to ask straight out in Ireland. When the lady arrived with our new bike she had the nerve to ask us to pay extra because the bike was bigger, obviously we refused since the bad scooter had ruined our plans for the day.
The new bike was great and we rode to the same beach as we had visited the previous day. There we had a nice lunch in a beach front bar before heading back to meet Andy in the hostel.
After a quick hello to Andy we abandoned him again to get facials. This was an interesting hour, we basically paid to have layers and layers of cream rubbed into our faces. At one stage the girl that was doing my face answered the phone and had a full blown conversation, the entire time just rubbing my nose over and over, I could feel my pores blocking with every minute I was in there.. At the end she gave us a quick back massage which she then tried to charge us extra for. We rushed back to the hotel and Laura gave me a facial scrub to remove all the cream.
That night we went for a little cycle to the historical part of Hoi An. This part of the town was so atmospheric at night time. The majority of Japanese style merchant houses situated on each side of the river were decorated with lanterns as were lots of the trees. The lanterns were all sorts of different shapes sizes and colours. I think in all of my travels Hoi Ai old town is one of, if not the most beautiful town I have seen in South East Asia.
Women were even selling little paper lanterns that you could buy and put floating on the river so that the river was dotted with floating lights of lots of colours. It was so beautiful but impossible to capture on camera so I don't any many pictures of the night.