When we arrived in Hoi An it was super early, and we trotted around a while looking at different optionis for accom, they were all called Thang Something Number. When We settled in Thang Vanh 2 (or something like that) in our huge room, we had breakfast in Thang Vanh 3 and then rented push-bikes from the annoying lady outside Thang Vanh 2 and headed for Cua Dai beach.

It was a 5km bike ride along one road down to the coast, first through the town, then through loads of farming land, then the beach just popped out of nowhere. And it was huuuuge and loooovely. The Nikki the Yank was still with us, and getting more and more annoying.

We walked right, and everywhere tried to charge us hundreds of thou just to be there, so then we walked left and got a couple of sun loungers and lay and read and iPod-ed and swam and drank mango puree and Lydia got her first of many surburns.

When then sun was low in the sky, we cycled back into the centre of Hoi An and washed etc before heading out for a potter around. Hoi An is famous for its tailoring. Famously you can show them a photo of your desired item(s) (some people taking hundreds of orders over) and they will slave away overnight to make your items ready for a fitting the following morning and a pickup that night. There are looads of shops offering this, and each has 20ish woman behind it, who look more and more tired as the weeks go on. All three of us played around with the idea of getting stuff made, but in the end none of us did. That's a lie, Julia got a dress made for her mum, but that was always part of her plan.

We wondered down towards where it felt like the restaurants were, shopping on the way. There was a little river-side area which was covered in lanterns and whole animal-lantern-things on little rock islands in the middle of the river with a big bridge, covered in lanterns connecting both sides. It was really beautiful, and loads of Vietnamese people were just hanging out there for the evening, tourists were few and far between. We had delicious king prawns in one of the restaurants with a balcony so we could enjoy the view, and followed this with a banana pancake.

Afterwards we went to 'Before and Now' as reccommended by the LP and although we hadn't planned to, got smashed. At one point throughout the evening some girls from medical school who we'd seen briefly before in Saigon popped by, but didn't stay for long. After the bar closed, we cycled back to the beach for a "Hot b**** party". Which was just a bar on the beach with louder music and a slightly more lecherous crowd. We stayed for an hour before cycling home again. The cycling both to and from the beach was fairly zig-zaggy but injury-less. Lydia enjoyed it the most.9/10 infact.

Bed.