At the appointed hour, we all met in the foyer of our hotel to jumped on bicycles for a cycling tour, led by Hoc. The bikes are all in good repair and we are given a helmet each to wear. Both are too small for me, but that's no surprise. We cycle around the edge of the main business district of the city to a long steel bridge to take us to the first of two islands we'll visit today. The cycling is easy on flat, concrete paths or roads, though the surface is not always in perfect repair.
Our first stop is where they are drying rice in a courtyard. It turns out as we ride on that they are drying rice everywhere; every flat surface in the sun is a potential rice drying bed. (At one stage we have to cycle through the drying rice as they've covered the whole path.) It is harvest time for this crop and there are many dry paddy fields that have been harvested already.
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| The bridge to the first island (looking back to Hoi An, and Andrea) | Rice drying in the courtyard of a pagoda |
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| Harvested | Not yet harvested |
More cycling through narrow lanes of villages. We're not seeing many people because it's hot and sunny today. We ride around to one shady area which turns out to be the local port for the island (we come back to this place at the end). We see young boys carving statuettes and idols from the local timber and men fixing or building boats. Mostly traditional boat-building approach but using power tools for convenience. And the usual standard of occupational health and safety prevails.
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| Boys carving statuettes for sale. The youngest one is purported to be seven. |
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| Boats in for repair |
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| A new boat in the traditional style | Working on the boat - OHS catastrophe |
More cycling across the island to a fishing village to see the nets out of the water and boats were drawn up to land. No one is working here because its a holiday in Vietnam for a few days; 30 April is reunification day and the country celebrates May Day too (from its communist heritage, I presume).
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| Fishing net suspended above the river, waiting to be used at night | The fishing fleet tied up for the holiday |
More cycling through villages on the second island reached by a causeway. This tour and the earlier motorcycle tour make me wish that I had a GoPro to allow capturing the scenery and then later keeping images and sections of the video as souvenirs.
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| Women drying rice in the fields; traditional dress, traditional practice |
The next stop to see sleeping mats being made. The family makes the mats from scratch, harvesting the reeds, drying them, splitting them, dying them and then weaving the mat. They can make about six metres (three sleeping mats) per day, which is a lot when you see how fine the reeds are. I bought some placemats for my table that the family had made specially to sell to tourists who couldn't take a whole mat away.
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| A field of reeds, with some harvested and drying | Reeds drying |
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| Bundled reeds, waiting for use | Reed stock for weaving, having been split and dyed |
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| Margot being held by Hoc, and Andrea being instructed by the woman whose shop this is, ruining a day's work for the family |
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| Hoc sharing around rice wine samplers |
After that demonstration, we visited a local distiller of rice wine, a veteran from the war who is missing half a leg. He's a bit of a local hero and a genuinely lovely man. He sang for us. Gywn played some guitar and Anna had a go too. (Among her collection of talents and features, Anna collects electric guitars played by metal bands; but she cannot really play herself.)
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| Mr Dan performing a traditional Vietnamese song for us | Gwyn repaying the courtesy |
After that lovely little stop, we cycle around to another home where we are shown how to make rice paper pancakes and then fed the product of our efforts in making them by a family who has been doing so for 50 years. One anomaly that I noticed was that they use an electric fan to stoke the fire under the pancake making pan but don't have an electric hotplate on which to make the pancakes.
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| The sun going down on this last long leg of cycling | Our rice pancake MasterChef and his equipment |
We cycle back to the wharf to get on a boat. We travel down the river in the dark and get off in town. The night markets are busy and the nightlife in Hoi An is in full swing. We cycle back through the madness of Hoi An night traffic to the hotel. It was a hoot! I shower head to bed early; a 5 AM wake up call is in my immediate future.
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| The city lights of Hoi An as we approach the town by boat on the river |
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| Lantern boats on the river in Hoi An |
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