Hoi An
Hoi An - an ancient town in Vietnam, a UNESCO world heritage, a thriving digital nomad community and a place with many hidden gems I tried to uncover. I lived there at the start of 2024 and survived to tell the story.
Two months, one scooter (🛵) crash and a metric fuck ton of karaoke later - the fever dream that was Vietnam came to a close. I couldn’t get rid of the palpable obsession I developed for the people I met and the life I lived in the little village of HoiAn. So, as it is the case with every self-respecting journalism major, needing to process experiences and emotions means putting them on paper.
First things first, I heard about HoiAn a year before boarding a flight from Sofia to Bangkok. I was spending March 2023 subletting the apartment of a Russian girl who lives in Bansko, snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoon. There, at the going away dinner for my friend Juan, I met Nick and Toby, who described the coastal town of HoiAn as their permanent base. My empty, yet intrigued look that night must have given away the fact that I knew embarrassingly little about Vietnam and even less about HoiAn.
We had one of those big pointy hats at home, a souvenir from my parents’ trip to South East Asia, and that was about the only thing that formed my mental image.
Somehow that, combined with too many conversations with drunk brits in the smoking area during freshers had created the impression that all of South East Asia was reserved for either gap-year wankers or 50-year old Easter Europeans. The only exception were thirty-year old divorcees who love pasta, prayers and sex. And as much as I wanted to fit into that third category, I lacked a certain level of desperation and paperwork.
Turns out I was wrong. Hoi An attracts possibly the best kind of westerners who want to escape the terrible weather at the start of the year. A refreshing combination of genuine people with diverse interests and a laid-back, yet authentic attitude towards life. But more on that, later.
HoiAn seemed like a very good base to explore South East Asia. It is mind-blowingly cheap, located next to a big city with a well-connected international airport and positioned in the middle of Vietnam with access to gorgeous beaches, everyday comforts and a thriving community of “digital nomads” (yes, I also get the yik from that term).
What to expect from HoiAn?
If you’ve ever spent summer school breaks at the country-side in Bulgaria, when the air isn’t too hot yet and the pace of life slows down - expect that. If not, I’m sorry, your childhood sucked. In more serious terms, you can expect a decent accommodation for about 400$* (bills included), great vegetarian food (if you’re not a snob) and complete lack of traffic laws.
Speaking of traffic laws, you’ll probably need to rent a scooter. Or at least a bike. My word of advice is don’t crash into taxis. Best not to crash at all but if given the choice, don’t choose the taxi car. I made this mistake on day one and regretted it until the end of the trip.
Survival guide for your first car crash in Vietnam
Picture this - you arrived in Vietnam late last nigh, and you woke up still kinda jet-lagged but beaming with excitement to begin your adventure. Your villa host, a 30-something Romanian, has already booked you a small motorbike that is waiting for you downstairs. He offers to show you around and point out the grocery stores, market and other helpful and notable things around the area where you are staying. Sure, he gives you kinda creepy vibes, but you’re too tired and excited to notice, so you get in the back, and he starts driving.
At first, everything is fine, you visit a couple of small local stores, buy some dragon fruit from an old lady at the fruit market and negotiate criminally cheap avocado rates. Then you get to a red light, and the host gets off the bike and says, “your turn to drive”. At this moment in time the narrator could have paused the video and said, “this is where things went horribly wrong”.
First of all, don’t start driving a new vehicle you are not familiar with in the middle of a busy crossroad. Secondly, check that the breaks work. Thirdly, don’t expect that rules of the traffic exist - Vietnamese people navigate based on vibes and whoever has the loudest honk. I learned this very quickly when three seconds in, I found myself on the ground.
My head was spinning, my leg was bleeding underneath the bike and sounds around me were muffled. What the actual fuck. In the following days, I learned a few more important lessons:
Third-party insurance is only theoretically mandatory in Vietnam.
A taxi driver is a special breed of person, identical across cultures and borders. When confronted by a seemingly wealthy (I’m not, but I look the part) white woman, they’ll do their very best to get as much money out of her as possible.
When your villa host is inadequate, he’ll give your phone number to random taxi drivers.
Five men waiting for you outside your home at night is scary.
Travelling alone can become daunting, but there are good people everywhere (special shout out to everyone who was next to me, virtually and in person,n during this scary episode)
And a few final words of advice if you’re ever in a weird situation when abroad: whatever you do, do not give your passport to anyone. Okay, enough about this. After a few days of obsessing about the crash, I was over it and wanted to move on.
Here are some places I spent my time to relax and feel better.
Notable stops in HoiAn for a great time:
🥥 Sound of Silence - my favourite beach restaurant/ coffee shop with yummy coconut coffees and good WiFi.
💆♀️ Citrus Health Spa - the Vietnamese massage there will make any future massage you ever receive appear inadequate.
🥜 Peanuts - if you only try one Banh Mi in Vietnam, it has to be their Gourmet Vegan one.
🍸 Mezcal Cocteleria - awesome music, unique cocktails, speakeasy vibes and endless popcorn on the house.
🛒 Xanh Xanh Market - if you are looking for Western products and the comforts you were used to back home, this shop is your best bet.
🧘♀️ Om Factory Yoga - challenging yoga practices with a view towards the rice paddies.
💪 HealthFit Gym - decent fitness equipment and running machines with more views towards the rice paddies.
🪡 Båo Diêp - You walk in with a Pinterest board, and you walk out dressed like one. 10/10 recommend.
👩💻 Hub Hoi An - a wonderful community, a calendar full of fun things to do and generally the best vibes I had experienced for a while.
🌊 Cham Islands - lush beaches and cute monkeys.
And if you are planning some nearby weekend trips I strongly encourage you to explore DaNang and Hue. You can get your fix for party and electronic music in the former and soak in the history in the latter.
I miss all of the above-mentioned things plus the sea, the landscapes and the endless supply of fresh Mango but …
What am I not going to miss in HoiAn (read this before you go)
The noise
Vietnam is a loud country. I’ve lived in busy cities before, and I figured that a population of 120,000 people was not even something to consider. I was wrong. Every day in Hoi An felt like the Vietnamese were aiming for some loudness world record that I didn’t know they were in the running for. It’s not just the car and scooter horns, it’s the karaoke.
So. Much. Karaoke. It’s the go-to way to relax for local people, which might make you think they are good at it, but you would be wrong. In their defence, the guiding criteria for good karaoke in Vietnam isn’t the quality of the performance, it’s the loudness. If you want to do well - scream!
This became even more apparent during Tet, the only annual holiday that locals have and the only time they are allowed to take two uninterrupted weeks off from work. It’s a celebration of the lunar new year and a time to get blindly drunk and scream in your living room with a microphone in hand (a ritual also reserved for pretty much any other day of the year).
And speaking of loudness... I went past a local wedding one day. Fun fact, weddings are celebrated in the morning and people go back to work in the afternoon. I won’t describe too many details, I’ll just leave the clip below.
Vietnamese wedding 💒
Feeling like a walking ATM
Vietnam is cheap compared to pretty much anywhere else. Which at some point makes you feel like you’re trading monopoly money. That, however, didn’t make it less palatable whenever locals** would try to scam me. The “scam” is usually always the same - they’ll quote a price for something, and then when the time comes to pay, they’ll invent a reason why *actually* you need to pay them 20% more. It’s like when the washing machine tells you your laundry will be done in 60 minutes, and then 75 minutes later, it is still spinning. Just let me know what you want from the start.
The pace of life
You never realise just how anal you are about little every-day situations until they completely change. If this were a rom-com, it would have suddenly dawned on me that I need to slow down, reconsider my life priorities and start a rice farming business that supports deaf Vietnamese children. But it’s not. The pace of life in Hoi An didn’t make me second-guess my neurotic behaviour; quite the opposite actually. I found appreciation for my otherwise pathetic time-management skills and reconsidered them as quite advanced. Still a happy ending, if you ask me.
Please forgive the typos.
Yours & delightfully dyslexic,
Dimana ✌️
*Pre-booking for a short time and finding your long-term accommodation on the ground is your best bet.
** This happens only on occasion, and I interacted with man,y many businesses and people who were completely honest and transparent