Nate and Kara visit Hoi An, 45 minutes south of Da Nang, staying in a $25/night hotel with views and free breakfast. They explore markets and tailor shops, nap through the afternoon heat, and eat regional noodles, banh mi, and espresso with ice cream.
It's currently 5:30 in the morning. I'm outside waiting on Jeff to pick me up on his motorbike. He's gonna take me down to the local fishing beach so we can watch the fishermen bring in their catch. And then after that, we're gonna drive up Monkey Mountain to hopefully see some monkeys and a thousand year old tree. We shouldn't have too much problem finding that since it's been in the same place for a.
Sa.
This says that tree is super old. This is all the same tree. That's the same tree. That's the same tree. That's the main part of the same tree. That's the same tree. Same tree.
Just all grow down from the branches.
Good morning.
Did you have fun?
Yeah.
We had to check out of our hotel really quickly this morning. I forgot to say, it's actually where we were going. Jeff and Nancy just drove us to Hoi an, which is a small city about 45 minutes south of Da Nang. From everything we've heard, it's like everybody's favorite city in Vietnam.
I'm so excited.
They just dropped us off. We're attempting to find our hotel and then we're gonna meet back up with them for breakfast. Found it.
Oh, I like this.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. I think this is us then. Yeah.
Cameron, right? I'm Tao. Nice to meet you, Tao, right? Nice to meet you, Tao.
Nice to meet you.
She is adorable.
This is super nice.
This room is really nice. Do we have to climb out the window to go outside?
No, it's got a door behind the curtain. I was thinking the same thing. I was looking forward to climbing out the window.
I think we should do it anyways.
Check out this view.
I'm pretty impressed. For like $25 a night, a good view and free breakfast.
Double thumbs up.
We just parted ways with Jeff and Nancy. They went back to Danang, and we've been walking around looking at shops the whole afternoon. And this place is adorable.
We're gonna be here for the next two days. So far, I would describe Hoi an as Hanoi minus about 10,000 motorbikes and with much better beach weather and more shop. Oh, my goodness. There are like a million shops here and Kara has not passed a single one. Anything that has flowy rompers, she is there. It's gonna be a long day.
We have done absolutely no research on what to do here, but so far walking around has been interesting enough. We just got to this massive market.
Food everywhere.
And we're spinning.
Wow, that's really cool.
She Just passed up dollar earrings.
There were too many.
Feeling a little warm.
Lost her again.
They are, like really hard on their sales pitch here. But I think we figured out that the camera is a deterrent. They seem a little shy about hard selling us when the camera's on. I'm trying to capture the. You buy something, we'll get it before we leave. One tailor shop, two tailor shop, three tailor shops, four tailor shops, five tailor shop.
All that shopping wore us out. Even though we didn't buy anything.
I bought one thing.
Since we've been in Vietnam, we've learned about this afternoon tradition.
And since we're in Vietnam, we decided that we should at least experience it one time.
Afternoon nap.
Seriously, Everybody takes afternoon nap like we were looking for some North Face jackets. Like right after lunch, every store we walked in, the person got up off.
The floor, there was a sleeping on the floor.
Just go to sleep.
I love it.
Yeah. So we're going to participate in the local tradition because it seems like the right thing to do.
Turns out we are naturals at the Vietnamese afternoon nap. We got that tradition down pat. How was your nap?
Great.
I have not had that hard a time getting her out of bed in a long time.
And the nap was your idea?
It was at least an hour.
We heard about this dish that you can only get in Hue an it sounds like similar to stir fried pho, but a little different with, like their own spin here. We just asked the lady at our hotel where the best place to get it was. She drew it out on the map. So that's where we're heading now then.
If we still have an appetite. Anthony Bourdain says the best Banh Mi sandwich is in this city, so we might just get that too.
I'm gonna say we're at least gonna have an appetite to split the sandwich. That's it.
This is what we came for.
We're the only ones here.
And we got this as a local recommendation from the lady that works at our hotel. And it looks local.
Definitely.
I like it.
And if it's not good, we'll just go get a bomb meat.
Looks like we have one choice of pork with noodles and green things.
Not similar to fasal. Looks pretty good, though.
Garrett seems to disagree.
We didn't get a big.
It's not bad.
This was a expensive expectations thing. I got her expectations here when I should have had them here.
If they were here, Carol would have disagreed.
Both saving room for banh mi. My research and planning the past two nights has resulted in two mediocre noodle dishes. Sorry. Okay.
Better than noodles, I guess.
Tell us what just happened.
So the main entrance to the old city is charging people. And earlier we got away with it because Jeff and Nancy are from here and they just said no and we kept walking. And I think we just found a way in without waiting.
And it's the coolest alleyway I've ever seen.
Yeah, we're in.
Secret passage. I expected an Anthony Bourdain recommended restaurant to be a little more crowded. There's the man. Can we get two 13s?
That's scary.
Oh, it's nice of her. She brought me to a new nun. I have high expectations for Anthony Mordan highly recommend it.
Better or worse than the Banh Mi in Hanoi.
That's what I was going to say. I hate to argue with the culinary master, but I think banh mi25 is better.
Well, Anthony Bourdain just hasn't been to Bonvie25 yet.
Problem. Anthony Bourdain, I'm sure you're watching our vlog. You need to reconsider and go to bond me 25 in. I can tell you my feeling well.
Because you videoed me talking about food and not started eating for a long time.
Kara feels like she has the flu.
I'm sorry. One more stop before calling it a night.
Check out the lighting this provides.
This shop has its own roaster, which is a good sign.
We just got espresso with ice cream.
If you gave me a million dollars and said you can buy whatever you want, this is what I would. But I don't know what to do. Should I eat the ice cream or should I drink the coffee?
I think you drink the ice cream before it melts.
That's delicious.
There's a concept. There's an interesting napkin situation we have going on here. This is like a sheet of paper. There's a lot of truth in this shirt. Hairy Buddha.
Tara wanted to know why there were so many scary mug shots on the table. We've established that they're passport photos. We're not the only ones with bad passport pictures.
