Does the wet suit you? (With apologies to Whit Deschner)

Jane and I travelled seprately to Hoi An (her by bus and me by air) meeting up again in Da Nang airport in the evening and catching a taxi with another couple ot Hoi An half an hour away.

Hoi An is a rapidly developing beach resort town with some offshore islands and probably the most tailors per square km of anywhere in the world (literally hundreds). Needless to say when most women get a sniff of this place their eyes roll back in their heads, their jaws widen into an attack-gape and they start salivating uncontrollably. We managed to spend $900 dollars on clothing in four days, including:

Jane: 2 suits (each with jacket, 2 pants, 1 skirt), 3 sets of pants, 5 blouses, 3 dresses, a woollen felt jacket,
Robert: suit with two sets of pants, great coat, five shirts.

It really is incredibly cheap, suits less than $100 and shirts/blouses/dresses for under $20. Most professional women could probably justify a trip to Hoi An from anywhere in the world simply on the money they would save over a year or two's clothes shopping.

Of course we had to fill in the time we weren't in the shop (averaged about 2 hours a day, with return trips for minor fitting alterations).

First day we cycled to the beach and swam and sunbathed for 2 hours. Big mistake as in our conceit that NZ has the worst sun in the world we didn't lather up with the sunscreen and got horribly burnt. This put an end to time in the sun for the rest of our Hoi An stay, we had to soak in the hotel pool for a few hours to take the sting out of it and found that the pool was a better bet for swimming from then on (necessary in the 30-35 degree hot sun and high humidity days).

Second day we hired a motorbike and took turns driving to travel 20-30km up the coast to marble mountain, where a big hill of marble sticks up out of the otherwise flat land, it is covered in a number of temples and caves with statues etc in them, and overall pretty good (better than the nepalese/tibetan JAM), but would have been better if the weather wasn't so hot and sunny. Surrounded by a huge number of marble working businesses churning out statues, furniture and objets d'art for very reasonable prices. This is another place that we will likely be back to one day to buy at - eg a marble table and 6 stools for $2000, shipping is easy to organise and cheap at only about $100 per cubic meter to New Zealand.

Third day was a real highlight; we went out on a "Discovery dive" where we were taken diving under strict supervision of a Dive Master for two hour-long dives on a coral reef, all for $90. This was very cool, lots of fisks (nearly put my hand on a scorpion fish - which would have been bad) brilliant visiblity, and lots of technical bits to pique the engineer's interest :-). We had enough of a taste from doing this that we are now going to do a dive course. Much cheaper than NZ at about $NZ300 vrs more than double that in NZ and still have good safety with western teachers. This should allow us to enjoy the best diving spots in the world when we hit Thailand in a few weeks.

Hoi An had fantastic food and great night life in it's sleepy little waterfront area. We stayed in a nice hotel with a pool, air conditioning, free breakfast tv etc for just $10 per night each and food and drink cost less than $20 each for the day even when we had a big night out, so living is pretty cheap. Having finished up our time in Hoi An we packed all the swag and headed off to Nah Trang, Vietnamese beach party town a 12 hour NZ $11 overnight bus trip down the coast.