Hoi An seems to be the nicest city in Vietnam to the south of the capital. Yesterday we had a walk through the old part of the city. We followed the path recommended in Lonely Planet and it was an enjoyable walk including local market with plethora of fruits and vegetables on offer, as well as freshly caught fish that you can see being unloaded from the boats on the river side of the market. In the cloth shops where we ordered our tailored clothes almost a week ago we also managed to agree on the delivery date set on today.

Today we slept in, watched HBO in our room (damn TV… - I don’t like these equipped rooms – they only steal time from you) and then we hired a motorbike for USD4 and rode outside of the city to see Marble Mountain.

Marble Mountain is a … marble ;) … mountain on which there are a few temples and shrines and lots of caves and even more steps leading you on a round trip up and down to see them. There is an entry fee of 15000 Dong (about USD1) and together with great views from the top it is quite worth it. It might cost you more at the end though, depending on how resistant you are against the people asking for donations in every temple or offering you incense sticks to buy.

Below the mountain it is yet another resistance test. “Come and see my shop, mister. Don’t have to buy, just look.”… Yeah, sure… The foot of the mountain is crowded with shops selling all the same – marble statues of all kinds and sizes, from little marble dolphin to a huge, two meter high statues of lions. As soon you arrive they tell you to put the motorbike to a place next to their shop and they will look after it. In exchange they expect you to buy something from them afterwards. Well, I have known these tricks for some time already and didn’t want to give them any levers to be able to get us into buying something and neither I wanted to see their blaming faces if we didn’t.

On our way back we took a road along the beach. This road was much nicer to ride on, with much less traffic and more native life around as we were riding through many fishing villages. This opportunity will probably disappear soon as they are building a brand new big road there, after which I suppose big resorts will come and destroy the normal local life as the locals know it now.

We turned to the beach twice to see the coast. It is dotted with the small round big basket-like fishing boats made of reed. Lots of plastic garbage is not missing of course. Children ran after us both times, second time only to see us, but first time also trying to get some money from us. These were a little older than the second lot.

When we returned back to Hoi An I exchanged some travelers checks as we needed more dollars to pay for our tailored clothes that we were about to try and pick up. I changed the checks in Agribank and was pleasantly surprised that they only charged 1% for the amount withdrawn in Dong and 1.5% for the amount withdrawn in US Dollars. I’m pretty sure I paid much more (4% I think) when I changed my travelers checks last year in Saigon.

Then we visited the tailor shops several times to try our clothes and have any adjustments made, had a very nice dinner by a street stall selling fruit shakes and noodles with roasted meat and finally picked our clothes. We are leaving back for Hanoi tomorrow morning.