Hoi An The old houses the craft and the fish

Well Hoi An is unashamingly touristic. Every old house has been converted to a shop or to a restaurant bar apart from the ones that are designated monuments.

It proves that commercialisation can be done right to preserve the local buildings

In the excellent folklore museum an old house we found a lot about the various people who inhabited Hoi An an how they became involved with silk weaving, farming but also fishing

And then we went to An Bang beach about 3 miles away

This has replaced Cua Dai beach that has eroded gradually.

Great place to relax, swim, have a beer.

Look to real fishing boats of the area. I helped to carry one and they are bloody heavy.

Since their catch was to be much later on, we thought a restaurant with live clams and mantis prawns will do.

And it more than did it. Mantis prawns taste more like lagoustines and their shell is harder than large prawns but softer than lagoustines. With garlic simply grilled mmmm

And on our return we collected our laundry expertly done and ironed by Mrs Sa. Ready for more now...

Earlier on we booked our train from our next stop the imperial city of Hue' to Ninh Binh for the 26th. After deliberation we decided to take the day train rather than the night one since we are not good sleepers anymore

In spite of what u find on the Internet the Vietnam railways site is straight forward to use with no issues. https://dsvn.vn/#/

And you get confirmation straight away