We started our first day in Hoi An with a bit of a lie in before wandering into what they call the ancient town. Hoi An was left pretty much unaffected by the war so there is still a whole section for town which has original Vietnamese buildings. It is so pretty with loads of brightly coloured lanterns hanging between all the old yellow buildings. We spent a while just wondering around taking it all in.
Most of the towns buildings are now shops, particularly tailors selling custom made clothes. There are 21 buildings which still house the complete original styles. For this we purchased a ticket which gave us access to 5 of these places. We started by going to see the Japanese bridge, which is pretty self explanatory! This you could see what you needed to without going inside so we moved on to pick our five places. The first we chose was the old house of Tan Ky. This was a house that had been left in the original style, complete with furniture which was interesting to see. The next was the Quang Trieu assembly hall. This was a pretty building with an amazing water feature made out of dragons, fish and turtles. We carried on to the museum of Sa Huyne culture, which held artefacts found in various archeological digs nearby. We headed to Quan Cong temple next, where there wasn't anyone to check tickets, meaning it got to be an added extra! Again this was another pretty building which had these massive spiral incense sticks hanging all over the ceiling, which looked really cool! Our next stop was Minh Huong communal house, which by this point felt a bit like it was looking like the rest of what we had seen. With one more place on our ticket we went to Phuc Kien assembly hall, which was quite impressive and on a much bigger scale than the other buildings we had seen.
Hoi An has taken us back to hot and sunny temperatures which is lovely but taking a bit of getting used to! By now we were getting a bit too warm and decided to head back to use the pool at the hotel. Unfortunately it was freezing cold and a bit dirty so we decided to go and chill out in the room instead and catch up on some sleep.
When we woke up we headed back out into town where we had a drink and appreciated Hoi An at night. They light up all the lanterns which makes it such a beautiful place to walk around. We headed back for some food and a bit of an early night as we are going to have another go at the Hai Van Pass tomorrow!