Hoi An

Hoi An is a UNESCO world heritage site and when you arrive here it's not hard to see why; it is a beautiful quaint fishing town on the banks of a small river with the beach only about 5km away (the other end of China Beach). After having to drag ourselves away from China Beach we were expecting our next destination to be a disappointment but Hoi An wasn't - and it is only about 15 miles from China Beach. Hoi An has beautiful french colonial architecture with narrow streets which house hundreds of tailors. The river front on both sides also houses tailors, bars and restaurants.

Hoa had recommended a tailor to us in Hoi An so we set out to find it and check out the prices and materials etc. We found the shop, and in the space of an hour or so we had both decided on a pattern, the material, the lining material, and detail of the suits we wanted and had been measured up!! Jo also decided to get a shirt tailor made for good measure. At 45 GBP each for our tailor-made suits and a couple of quid for the shirt we were really getting in to the swing of things and so I decided to also have a dress made!! (A shock - I know). We had to go back the next day for our first fittings and again the day after for final fittings before we were ready to ship them back to the UK, so the tailor made a call to the post office...The post office sent a man on a moto with his scales and boxes to us at the tailors to weight the items, box them up and give us our receipt - now you just can't imagine ever getting that kind of service from Royal Mail can you?! He has even emailed us since to confirm the box has left and for us to email him when we receive it in the UK!!

By now, the Premier League has started back home and luckily for us you can watch live matches here in Vietnam on cable which is provided by all good guest houses and is on in most bars...so we just so happened to catch the Liverpool Vs 'Boro game whilst sitting in a lovely bar chatting to some more people we met! We also did cultural things such as see the Japanese covered bridge.

Hoi An is beautiful and would be very easy to spend plenty of time there but the next leg of the journey was calling and we arranged to get a night bus to Nha Trang.