Tailor Made for Hoi An

We absolutely loved Hoi An - full of charm and an UNESCO world heritage sight to boot. The old town gives way to brightly coloured, slightly tumbling down French-colonial shop fronts and restaurants sporting paper lanterns strung between the trees; French architecture meets decorations from the Orient. The local beer served in the river-facing, chateau-style restaurants was even called Biere Larue! The jolly people of Hoi An are such fun too - always a smile, a hug and a kind (Vietnamese) word. Beth's dimples seemed to be a particular crowd-puller and it was a disgruntled Steve who tagged behind a Vietnamese group trying to prod Beth's cheeks. She tried to explain she was just chubby but they were having none of it.

Aside from the UNESCO world heritage site of the Old Town and the gorgeous restaurants lining the river, one of the main attractions of Hoi An that pulls in many a traveller is the tailor-made clothing business. There are over 200 tailor shops in Hoi An offering pretty much the same service; tailored made clothing at a quarter of western prices. We were lured by a Vietnamese lady with the biggest smile on earth (without dimples) and ended up on the largest retail therapy binge we are ever likely to indulge in. Armed with the Next catalogue, Moss Bros and magazines galore, we flicked through until we found clothes we fancied. Once this (hard) task was taken, we then had to choose fabrics, any variances of design and were then measured...hey presto, 24 hours later your garment is ready. The only hard part was parting with the cash and that was easy because it's all so cheap - 30GBP for a tailored three piece suit. We had five! You think we're joking? After further purchases at the shoe tailor, our shopping list looked like this:

Steve
Dinner Jacket with shirt, bow tie and cummerband
3 pairs of boxer shorts
Suit
3 shirts
2 pairs of shorts
Trainers

Beth
2 x 3 piece suits (jacket, skirt and trousers)
2 shirts
Cocktail dress
(Gorgeous) evening coat
2 x trousers (raw silk)
couduroy skirt
Knee high boots
Work shoes
Trainers

What would have cost us well over 1500GBP in the UK, at most cost us 300GBP in Vietnam. Beth really thought she had died and gone to heaven. Oil paintings and bamboo dishes added to our growing collection of Vietnamese goods and our diminishing savings! High on retail therapy we left the lovely Hoi An before we spent our entire remaining budget and visited My Son - an incredible religious site built in the 10th century. In a similar vein to the Angkor Wat complex, but on a much, much smaller scale, My Son has almost given up the ghost and lost it's battle to the wonderful lush jungle surrounding the site. Now it's a UNESCO world heritage site and justifiably so. The temples have a mystery that is shares with it's distant relations, the Egyptian Pyramids - archaeologists can't work out how the constructions were sealed together. Team that with cryptic wording on tombs that noone has yet to crack, we felt we were in our own version of the Da Vinci code (if you haven't read the 'Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown then you should!). The $800,000 reward for the first person to crack the code saw us scrabbling to our knees in hope: Steve because he saw a way to rebuild our finances and Beth because of all the more tailored clothes she could buy! Unfortunately parts of My Son were used as the Viet Cong headquarters during the American War and some sites were sadly destroyed as a result of fierce US bombing campaigns. The rest of the site however is under conservation to preserve the temples from further jungle intrusion.