Good morning Vietnam,

We are still in Hoi An but moving on tomorrow and have just lost Rich today so thought it would be a good point to do a summary of the last few days.

When we left you in the last blog we had spent a day wandering around Hoi An and had placed our order for our clothes. Our second day was spent very much like the first and because we were due to go for our second fitting for our clothes at various points of the day we didn't want to go too far from the hotel and the centre of town. Gemma was the first to try on her dress followed an hour or so later by Katie and me (note suit not dress!!). All the clothes we had made were spot on with a few minor alterations; so much so that a few additional orders were very quickly place once we saw the quality. The tailors we have chosen to use was called Kimmys and was probably the busiest place in town so we were glad we had given ourselves a few days here to allow our clothes to be made.

The rest of day, in between our various fittings, was spent either eating or checking out the rest of the town. It was so hot here in the sun that most of us tried as much as we could to be out of it which made checking out the sites quite slow going. The evening was spent unsurprisingly back at our restaurant with our 4000 dong beers before visiting a few others and trying to find the infamous 'why not bar' (well why not). After failing miserably, we eventually found ourselves at a bar with British bar staff, run by a Frenchman something we hadn't expected to see in Hoi An and the bar was packed full of expats.

The next day we got up early to go for a quick visit to central market before starting a cooking course we had booked on the day before. As Hoi An is well known for its cuisine most of the restaurants offer some kind of cooking course but we had opted for a slightly low key affair with more one to one tuition. This was particularly useful for me because I can't cook British food never mind Vietnamese food. The lady that ran the course was very friendly and spoke relatively good English, luckily for us. We cooked a total of 4 courses starting with spring rolls followed by chicken soup which was all relatively straight-forward, we even started a competition between the boys and the girls to see who was the best cooks. The following two courses were either barbequed fish or chicken in chilli and lemongrass and my favourite calamari. All the food we cooked was pretty good except we didn't really have finesse of our teachers so had relatively rectangular spring rolls or quite peppery soup in Gemma's case (teaspoon error). Overall the girls probably just edged it although me and rich will never properly admit it.

The afternoon was spent in our new second home…Kimmys... trying on our new pieces of clothing and checking the finishes on the rest. We ended up visiting twice in the afternoon but finally had all the clothes finished and ready to take home. It total between the four of us we have ended up with 5 dresses, 5 shirts, 2 ties, 2 suits, 1 jacket, 1 pair of trousers, and 2 winter jackets… oops! Now all we need to do is work out how we are going to get it all home!

The evening was spent having more lovely food and quite a few cheap drinks to soften the blow of all the money we had spent and also to say bye to Rich as this was his last evening with us.

On our final day in Hoi An we decided we should do something a little cultural rather than just spend our whole time here shopping and eating. So we booked on a trip to My Son (pronounced mee-son) which is a large collection of Cham temples that were built in the 6th century. The site is located about 30km from Hoi An and required us to get a bus out there. This was one of the most hair raising experiences that I've experienced in a while, with the bus driver going far too quickly and worrying us as we entered every corner. It turned out we had good reason to be so apprehensive because with only a few km left to go on a country road he put the front of the bus into a tree branch while rounding a corner. Unfortunately for us we were all sat on the front row of the bus and got covered in glass when the branch hit. Since the window shattered into such small shards none of us got hurt, amazingly, apart from a few tiny cuts and a bit of a shock. Although the whole windscreen was not completely smashed he did a pretty good job of it and took out the side window a bit further down for good measure. The worse thing was that neither the driver nor his English speaking companion apologised and even tried to blame the tree, as if it had just grown like that overnight rather than their own incompetence. Once back on the bus we sat right at the back as we knew there was only a short way to go but where very thankful when we arrived at My Son.

My Son is a collection of small temples that were created by Cham people (some form of ancient Hinduism) as a place of worship back in the 6th century but were then abandoned and remained un-discovered again until the 1830's when a French explorer uncovered them again. Unfortunately quite a lot of the site has been destroyed during the war with a lot of US bombing in the area but some areas are still intact which is what we came to see. The ruins of the temple were quite something and I'm really pleased we made the effort to go see them as we don't have time to visit some of the more impressive ruins such as Angkor Wat.

On the way back we had a brief ride on the bus (the driver still drove like an idiot, much to our annoyance) before taking a boat the rest of the way down the river back to Hoi An. The boat ride thankfully was much less dramatic than our journey to My Son. We had a nice peaceful ride down the river and back in to the town. It had been another really hot day so we managed to get some really nice pictures as we floated back into town on the river.

Once back on dry land we went back to the hotel and chilled out with Rich for an hour before saying goodbye as he got in his taxi to the airport. We have had a really nice time travelling with him and hopefully he is going to let us know all the best places to go in Hanoi. The rest of us have no major plans for the evening but are off early to Hue in the morning so are likely to have an early night.

Will update you all soon on our adventures in Hue when we get there.

Lots of love

Martin, Katie, Gemma and Rich