Temples, shopping and fish wine - that pretty much sums up my time in Hoi An and I love it!

We arrived on Monday at 7am very tired and sat at the bus station for an hour waiting for our hotel to pick
us up, which they eventually did. The hotel was a recommendation from the guys we met in Nha Trang and it's lovely, the staff are really nice, our room is lovely with a view of the pool and the breakfast is almost editable (although we're both getting soo sick of eating eggs every day). Unfortunately the weathers not great, it's been overcast and cool since we arrived and I have actually been wearing a fleece (shock horror).

The town here is beautiful, it's very French in its architecture and has lots of cute little cafes and restaurants and importantly shops. I'm trying not to buy anything though as I'll have to carry it for another two months but I did buy a gorgeous silk scarf (Hoi An is famous for silk) and a tiny little pointy Vietnamese hat for Smudge (Hayley, I've decided your not getting anything, I'm just going to buy outfits for your dog!), I also got given a miniature purse as a gift from the women in the shop (Ne and Nah) does Smudge get pocket money?

Food update: I've got back on board with eating the local food now and had a delicious meal on the river side of snapper wrapped in banana leaf with lemon sauce which was lovely. However, what was not so lovely was De Lat, Vietnamese red wine i had with it, it tasted like fish, yes, fish. I had to have two sips to be sure, but it was definitely the most disgusting wine I've ever tasted (Michelle I really should have listened to you on that one). On the note of disgusting, I decided to raid the mini bar and have a toblerone last night, I was just about to have my second piece when I noticed little ants coming out of the wrapper, ahhhhhhh! I may have slightly thrown the toblerone across the room and had a bit of a hissy fit about how I'm sick of having ants in my food (cornflakes, bread, lychees and now chocolate)!

Today we went on a trip to My Son (pronounced 'me son'), we didn't actually know what this trip entailed but felt like a day out. If we'd known it entailed temples (weve seen soooo many tenples) we may not have gone but it turned out to be pretty interesting. We had a very loud tour guide who enunciated his words a bit too much and was quite annoying. He told us about how the Cham people from Indonesia built 70 temples at My Son, however, only 30 survived the bombing by the US during the Vietnam war. In the 1800s the French rediscovered My Son and bizarrely they cut the heads off all if the statutes and carvings and took them back to France, they are now in the Louvre. As such the Vietbanese have had to reconstruct many of the statues which now visibly have newer heads. They also rebuilt walls in the structures, however, they haven't been able to figure out how the temples were originally built as they used no mortar between the bricks. When they tried to reconstruct parts of the temple they found they couldn't do it with anything but concrete. In addition, some of the walls that were built 30 years ago are covered in mould and decaying, however, the bricks that thave been there for over 1000 years look like new. The tour guide said if we had any ideas on why this is and how the Cham people built the temples the heritage foundation would like to know, so, ideas on a postcard.

After My Son we had a boat trip down, what essentially looked like the Orwell river (see pics). We stopped off on an island where they built and repaired boats, carved wood ornimants and made insence which was interesting. Again, I wanted to buy lots of random crap but don't fancy carrying it for months, and frankly, when I get home I will undoubtedly realise it is indeed crap and doesn't seem quite so charming when your not in a little Vietnamese village!

Tomorrow we're getting a 4hour bus to Hue. Still not sure where we'll be for Xmas but its looking like Hanoi.