da nang me, da nang me! take a rope and hang me…

so, after a very comfortable overnight train ride, we made it to Da Nang safely.  From there, we took a minibus to a small town called Hoi An.  Now, we had heard from a few people that Hoi An is all about clothes but i don’t think we really grasped just how rad it was going to be.  to be honest, i didn’t think, prior to going, that i was going to even get anything. once there though, we spared no time trying to find the perfect tailor. 

let me back up by saying, Hoi An is one of the only towns spared by bombing during the war.  all of the buildings are a beautiful pale yellow color and the streets are made of compact dirt.  there’s really only two main streets that run through the town with a few small side streets and an open market.  it’s no surprise, the food here was absolutely incredible as well. 

ok, back to shopping…  so, drew and i are cruising through town trying to find the right tailor.  what ya gotta do is, walk around, kinda figure out in your head what you want, and then go ask each shop how much it would be for them to make.  while in the shop, you generally get a good or bad feeling about the place (keep in mind, every other shop is a tailor so there’s quite a few to check out).  so, we’re making our rounds and as we’re doing so we also decide to scope prices from travel agencies for train or bus tickets from Hoi An to Saigon.  as we turn a corner, we see a travel agency and a dude sitting at the counter talking to the agent.  drew does a double take and almost immediately notices it’s a friend of his from back home named Jed.  Jed received a grant through the University of Washington to travel the world.  pretty rad, huh?  Anyway, Jed had already spent a few days in Hoi An so he gave us the lowdown as far as tailors to see and places to eat and drink.  we wound up going with the tailor he suggested, Mr. Xe, and making plans for drinks later that night.

Mr. Xe is a tiny Vietnamese man who always wore white pants and was outrageously gay.  we fell for him pretty quickly!  drew got an amazing chocolate brown pin stripe suit and a fabulous chocolate brown toggle coat while i got an emerald green satin dress!  custom made clothes? yes puhlease!

 the next day we hitched a ride to Da Nang with Jed who was on his way to the train station.  we said our ‘goodbyes’ to him at the American military base and headed for the hole in the wall to get a better glimpse at the place our father’s spent some serious time.  as we were walking up to the hole i noticed three vietnamese men watching us from behind.  as we neared the hangers inside i saw the men behind us had stopped and were now just staring.  i turned to tell drew and as he turned to face me, from behind drew came a guy running towards us yelling with an AK-47!  i said, “drew! behind you!” then turned and ran as fast as i could to get out of there.  on my race back to the street i looked back and saw drew standing there with his hands in the air while the guy cocked the gun and pointed it at him.  i left drew behind!  i took a peak behind the wall and saw drew walking calmly towards me and knew that it was cool.  still though, the guy with the gun followed us out of there and watched us walk away.  i’m sure it was pretty funny for the three guys who stopped to stare at the dumb tourists naively walking onto private property…  someone later told us that apparently that American military base has the highest concentration of Agent Orange in the entire country.  could it be they were just trying to keep us safe?

from there we walked down china beach for about an hour or so. the weather wasn’t so great so we decided to call it quits.  our woes continued when we tried to hail a taxi back to Hoi An (a mere 30km south).  ALL of the taxis wanted to charge us an insane amount of money to take us home.  we eventually found our way to the train station where we sat for two hours waiting to find a taxi to Hoi An that was reasonable. 

the next day we collected our clothes and prepared to leave on a 24 hour bus ride to Saigon.  At least we had a sleeper bus for the night portion of the ride.  the awesomest part was when just a few hours before our bus was to depart drew got really sick and was puking his brains out.  drew being the brave soul that he is though sucked it up and we took off on time. 

i thought 24 hours on a bus was bad until i got to Laos and took a meager 5 hour bus ride, but that story is saved for later…