A second new year

I arrived in Hoi An the day before my friend. I'd taken an overnight sleeper bus - something I didn't expect to do but the trains were all booked out for Tet. I'd heard horror stories about the sleeper buses but it wasn't too bad. I slept most of the way mainly because being short I could stretch out flat. Yay for shortness! Hoi An is an interesting place. The old centre is UNESCO listed and feels a bit like a movie set albeit one full of tailor and souvenir shops. The market is fabulous and the perfect place to buy limes to go with the bottle of gin my friend bought with him! The next 5 days were packed full of eating, drinking and cooking classes. Hoi An has some fabulous restaurants. We had an amazing 3 course meal at a relatively swanky place and it only cost $20! Culinary highlights included squid stuffed with pork, dumplings filled with banana and cinnamon and served with coconut ice cream, pomelo salad and beef in betel leaves. Thats on top of a day long cooking course where we learnt to make pho from scratch. There were lots of processes including making rice noodles. It was very rewarding to eat a version of the national dish that you've cooked yourself! We did a day trip to the Cham ruins at My Son. They were badly bombed in the war so all that remains are a third of the structures that originally existed. It was also the first time I'd taken a package type tour which are fine until (surprise!) you end up at some souvenir grotto. New Years Eve mark II was fun -there were fireworks and the whole town was lit up with coloured lanterns. The streets were teeming with people and motos but lacking the public drunkeness of our new years. We decided to skip out of Hoi An a day early and head to Hue to see the citadel. The imperial palace is very cool but we only had time to see a small part of the town within the citadel walls. Having another day woulds have been great to hire a bike and have a look around but we needed to keep moving onto HCMC and Phu Quoc. We travelled from Hue to Danang by train then a plane - we did many types of transport that day! This particular train trip was on my list of things I wanted to do and even the stinky, post Tet train couldn't over shadow the beauty of the coastline and the Hai Van Pass - the train actually climbs the mountain and has the most amazing views.