Town of food and tailors

My bus to Quy Nhon was a 3rd-world experience. There was no 1PM bus, as I'd been informed there was, and the 3PM bus seemed to be full. The lady at the ticket window advised me to stick around to see if a seat opened up, which I did until about 2:30, but by then everyone had arrived and claimed their tickets. My 1PM deperture became a 4PM departure, so I killed time in a nearby pagoda that was much more peaceful than the bus terminal.

My bus's driver thought he was Schumacher. He cut aggressive paths through curves, leaving passengers hanging on to the armrests. The 1A highway, Vietnam's major North-South route connection HCMC and Hanoi, is one lane each way and involves passing lumbering dumptrucks on blind curves on tortuous coastal mountain roads. In some spots the road is perfectly paved, in others the ground under the asphalt seems to have sunken away, leaving unmarked pits requiring evasive action. Pedestrians and motorbikes hurry across the road in the dark.

The one nice part of the trip came at night. It was raining and dark as we raced past a bay. There were lights out on the water that I at first thought must be a bridge, but as we got clser I realized they were boats with batteries of fluorescent lights hanging off the sides, presumably to draw squid to the surface. One island was surrounded by hundreds of these boats, an eery sort of fairy necklace or halo of ghost boats. They seemed other-worldly and beautiful in the distance, but I imagine that closer-in they would be cold, wet, and miserable.

In Quy Nhon the motorbike taxis chased the bus through the station gate. One driver hopped off his bike and kept trying to pull open the locked sliding door. Because the bus (actually a Sprinter) had power locks, they wouldn't open as he pulled on the handle. In disgust I skipped the motorbike taxi again, instead opting to hike my gear 4km up the beach through town.

It was a Friday night, and as I walked I was passed by gangs of teenagers on identical motorbikes. They cruised slowly up and down the streets, 2 or 3 to most bikes, but there was the occasional lone wolf who'd from time to time stand up on his scooter and rev the little 50cc motor for all it was worth. They were a ridiculous spectacle circling back and forth, especially as frustrated cars and trucks laid into their horns, trying to pass the band. Gaggle? The bikers would eventually ease into a single lane to let people pass, but they'd take their sweet damned time about it.

Quy Nhon was quiet. It's a beach town, but the weather wasn't any good during my two days there, so I checked out the temples and churches and spent hours wandering the streets. I hung out with some backpackers at the hostel- drinking beers on the beach or in the lobby. We also hired a boat to take us to an island in the bay. There's a statue of a Vietnamese hero pointing defiantly towards China, apparently telling the invaders to go back where they came from. There used to be an abandoned US tank that emerged from the surf at low tide, but unfortunately the city government recently had it moved. I tried to run along the beach, but the town's fishing industry ensured that there weren't too many litter-free stretches nearby the hostel.

I opted to take the train from Quy Nhon to Hoi An, in hopes of getting some sleep and maybe not dying. The trip is actually from Dieu Tri, 13km from Quy Nhon, to Danang, 30km from Hoi An. I got a seat rather than a sleeper, planning on relying on the tray table as a pillow and saving some money, but I got one of the 2 seats in the whole train car that didn't have a seat in front of it for a tray table. I didn't get much sleep.

It was raining in Danang when I arrived at 5:40AM, and in the last moments of darkness. As I walked out of the train station I overheard a couple of foreigners say that they were going to Hoi An, so I latched onto them. They turned out to have been traveling for 7 months, and had picked up a nifty trick. They had met a tour group bound for Hoi An while in the sleeper cars, and they planned to hitch a ride on the group's bus if there was room. There was, and the driver decided on the arbitrary price of 50,000 dong ($3), which I assume went straight into his pocket and not the tour company's account. I had been prepared to pay up to 100,000 for a motorcycle taxi, but that wold have been a cold and wet 30km. My other option was a public bus, but that required hiking to the Danang bus station and then from the Hoi An station into town. This tour group's bus was fast, cheap, and convenient, and by myself I never would have thought of it quickly enough to hitch a ride before they left.

I spent an hour wandering town and asking about hotel roooms, but it was still only 7AM and rooms were either too expensive or the staff didn't yet know whether there'd be check-outs. I'd resigned myself to paying $15 for the first night and moving the next day, so I went back to a cheaper hotel to reserve a room for the next day. When I got there the receptionist told me that they did in fact have one $5 dorm bed, which she didn't tell me about the first time. I snapped it up. I heard a lot of people asking about rooms to no avail, so it's fortunate I was there early.

I went to breakfast with some people from the dorm room. Dennis, a heavily pierced and tattooed preschool teacher from Holland, Takeo from Japan, whose English wasn't very good, and Sarah from Melbourne. Sarah turns out to be half Thai and half Iranian, a combination that apparently produces very beautiful people. We ate noodle soup and crispy rice pancakes at a morning market, surrounded by Vietnamese buying produce and meat. Then we got coffee at plastic tables under an umbrella by the river. It may have been the best cup of coffee of my life. They have a plastic bottle filled with concentrated black coffee goop which they dilute with hot water and serve. It sounds unappealing, but it was amazingly good.

We split up at that point, and I spent most of the morning going to tailors. My first stop was a cobbler that had Converse All Star high tops out front. The draw was the fact that the Converse logo was stitched by hand, which was completely awesome and ridiculous. I talked to the store owner, and for $13 I designed my own Converses. They're red, lined with a a red and white stripe pattern, with an identical tongue. I spent a while looking at fabrics before I picked one of the more modest tailors to copy a shirt I had with me- my pink and white striped Gap shirt that fits me so well. I had it done in pink, white linen, and white with blue and orange pinstripes. 3 shirts made to order for $30, in less than 24 hours. Today I went to get 4 more shirts made, at a different place with more fabric. I got another copy of the same shirt, this time actually making the waist a little narrower, plus 3 shirts with French cuffs that they fitted me for. I even had them dye cotton to match a color I requested for one of the shirts. The total for those 4 shirts was $48. Today I passed a corduroy jacket on the street that caught my eye. They'd run out of the fabric color they'd used in the display model, so I took the one off the rack and had them alter it for me. So, in total, 7 button-up shirts, 1 jacket, and 1 pair of shoes, all made to order and fitted, for $116.

I said that in addition to being full of tailors this town was foodie heaven, but I'll wait until I've had my cooking class to elaborate on that, especially as I'm sick of typing.