The train from Hue down south to Da Nang is one of the highlights of Vietnam. It travels along the ocean nearly the whole time, sometimes right at sea level, other times climbing along the edges of hills that rise hundreds of feet above the water. We were traveling on a bright sunny day and thoroughly enjoyed the whole trip. We took a taxi the remaining 20 kilometers down to Hoi An from Da Nang, passing the famous China Beach and Marble Mountains.
Hoi An is an ancient trading city, once one of the major ports of Asia, but now a relatively sleepy town known primarily for its beach, tailors and old town. Given the quality of all three, I expect that it won’t remain a sleepy town for terribly long; apparently the transformation is already well underway, with a dozen new hotels built in the last five years. We found a nice place to stay near the beach, about five kilometers from town, with a nice swimming pool and a view out onto the river that connects the town with the ocean. We walked into town every morning, then took cyclos back home, with the two drivers chatting the whole way, while Mary and I fought off the urge to fall asleep after another long day.
We planned ahead to have some clothes made in Hoi An, figuring that no trip to Asia would be complete without some tailor made clothing. We did a lot of research ahead of time to pick which of the 500 tailors in Hoi An to visit, since it’s nearly impossible to get unbiased advice in the town itself (everyone is related to a tailor). We picked two different tailors, deciding to have suits made at what is generally regarded as the best tailor in town (Yaly Couture), and shirts made at a cheaper but still recommended tailor (22 Le Loi, named after its street address). The two shops are radically different in appearance. Yaly Couture is a two story, dark wood paneled shop filled with a dozen women ready to help you pick out designs and fabrics, or take measurements and do fittings. It’s a beehive of activity, with another dozen customers in various stages of the process at any given time. 22 Le Loi, by contrast, is a one woman shop, and only once did we see any other customers stopping by. All of the work is done back at her house, with her brother serving as tailor and other family members acting as seamstresses (I think).
All of our clothes turned out wonderfully! I ended up getting 2 suits made (1 wool, 1 linen), 3 shirts, and 3 pairs of casual pants. Mary got 1 suit (with matching skirt), 1 trenchcoat, 2 dresses, 3 shirts, 3 pairs of casual pants, and 1 pair of leather pants! That all came out to a bit under $800, largely due to selecting very high quality wool and linen for our suits. For those of you who will see us at weddings, bar mitzvahs, or family reunions later this summer (5 in total, the travelling doesn’t end when we get home!), I’m sure you’ll see some of them modeled. Mary and I both had a pair of shoes made as well (at a different shop) and had more mixed results. Mary’s turned out well in the end, but only after having them remade from scratch when they used bad material the first time, and mine were just generally disappointing, although nothing in particular that I could point to (or have fixed in the time we had left).
We decided to ship most of our clothes home from Vietnam since there was too much to carry with us. We brought everything to the post office directly from the tailors, with some presents and other stuff mixed in. It ended up being quite a bit (almost 15 kilos), and the post office clerk insisted on going through every single item and making sure that we’d itemized it and declared a reasonable price. This turned out to be a difficult task, given her limited English and our non-existent Vietnamese. The items of most concern turned out to be the CDs I’d burned containing our photos; she warned us a couple times that if they contained any “improper” photos, they would be confiscated. I wasn’t sure if she meant porn or images of military bases or either, but we weren’t in danger either way.
Although we did spend a lot of time inside the tailor shops, we still had plenty of time left to walk through the old city, swim in the pool, and walk along the beach.
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