Restful Stay in Hoi An
Hoi An 3/8/2025-3/11/2025
I know we tried to relax in Da Nang but I was making damn sure our 3 nights in Hoi An would provide the relaxation and rejuvenation we were looking for. I decided to book a us a stay at a 4-star hotel. We got the family suite and for some reason it was cheaper than other room. But this room was nice. Big bathroom, nice balcony, second bathroom with a little chill zone. And of course this place came with a free breakfast. When you are traveling and bouncing around a lot, nothing beats a good free breakfast and this breakfast was unmatched.
The first night we treated ourselves by ordering food directly to the hotel. We enjoyed some Vietnamese entertainment on the television. They even had silk robes in the closets which I put on immediately. Living in luxury!
The following day, we rented a motorbike from the hotel and spent most of the day exploring the local area. The main draw for the city of Hoi An is the historic old town. As you approach this portion of the city, you notice the buildings become more condensed and the streets become crowded. And at a certain point, there are no more vehicles allowed making it a pedestrian only area. Then, if you keep going you get to a bridge that takes you to an island which is also part of this historic old town. We stopped for a coffee in the old town but the area really didn't get popping until the evening. Thats when all the shops and street vendors open up.
We did a ton of little motorbike excursions through out the day. We would be on google maps just looking for a beach, or a view point, or anything we thought would be cool to see by motorbike. We saw a little beach that was on the river and on our way there we had to weave through a field full of cows. There was still a little swell in the water so we went to check out the actual beach but the waves looks like shit. I was glad because I had no way of surfing them anyways.
That night we hit the night markets hard and had some killer street food. We tried some meat skewers and a Vietnamese pancake which is a crepe like crispy pancake made from rice flower and full of meat, chopped veggies, and sauces.
A lot of the mattresses in Vietnam and Thailand were quite hard. But this bed at the hotel was soft and exactly what I had been craving. This was the nicest bed I had seen in a while and I was able to get countless hours of quality sleep during our time there.
For our last full day in Hoi An, we decided to do a motorbike loop of our own. We woke up early to hit the road in hopes to get to some ancient buildings before the massive amount of tourists got there. I guess we didn't leave quite early enough because it was quite packed. I was pretty stunned how buildings that were over 1,400 years old still stood even after they had encountered some bombings during the Vietnam war. We did not stay for too long as we had much more ground to cover. Biking through the country by ourselves felt super freeing. We had no guide and there weren't any other tour groups around. I felt like we could really see what Vietnam was all about. We were given stunning view after stunning view. We traveled through completely empty highways with shops on either side that were completely closed. This was a crazy contrast to the hectic city of Hanoi. Around lunch time we started looking for a place to eat. The first couple places we went to were closed. We did not think much of it. We would just go to the next town and get food there. But the same thing happened, ever place we tried to get food at was closed. We found one coffee shop that was open but only sold coffee. On top of starting to get real hungry, it began to rain. We had another hour of riding before we were back at the hotel. We sucked it up and made our way back through the rain.
Our last night, we again hit the night market hard having even more street food. I had my last ban mi sandwich which was bitter sweet. I still think about them. We came back and played some pool. Camila beat my ass twice! I was pissed. We had a long day and we were pooped. I was stoked to enjoy one last night in that bed.
We had a travel day to Singapore on our last morning in Hoi An. But before that we hit that delicious free breakfast one last time. We had been in Vietnam for almost a month and it was sad to leave all of the things we grew to love about this country. As always, we were excited for what was to come.
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