Full Moon Festival in Hoi An

We started the day with two excellent coffee shakes. Nice and strong. The weather looked like it had turned in our favour again, so we hired a couple of bicycles (10000 dong each) and headed off to the beach, passing through some lovely agrarian scenes on the way; the countryside never seems very far away in Vietnam. When we arrived at the beach, someone there tried to charge us 5000 dong each to park our bicycles, but I managed to get him down to 5000 together when I complained that the bikes only cost 10000.

After a nice wee sunbathe and swim we headed back into town for the full moon festival, stopping off for some bia hoi on the way. To my horror it cost 5000, so they are obviously not part of the cartel; however in compensation they gave us some snacks to have along with our beer: some boiled quails eggs.

Japanese Bridge

Back in town, we (inevitably) bumped into Marty and Jochem, and discovered (inevitably) they were staying in the same hotel as us again. The full moon festival looked pretty, but there wasn't really much going on: stalls selling food and lamps, and people selling candles in lanterns to sail down the river for good luck, as well as loads of floats of mythical creatures on the river. During the course of the evening we bumped into Russell, who was about to start heading north again, so we won't see him again. After a fair bit of harrassment from little kids I bought a lantern and threw it into the river, where it breached against the side. Immediately a small child scrambled down the side and lifted it our of the water, presumably to resell to some other unsuspecting, to-be-luckless shmuck.

Emboldened by the experiment of the previous night we bought a bottle of the local brandy to drink in our room.

written by

The Happy Couple on February 8, 2009 from Hoi An, Vietnam

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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