The Smooth Silky Simplicity of Hoi An

One of the fears we had when we bought an ‘all-inclusive’ tour of Viet Nam was that we wouldn’t have flexibility to see the things we wanted to see, or to stay or go when we wanted. All of our tour guides proved to be very good at moving us when we wanted to go, taking extra time at some locations, or adding sites that we would find interesting.

Hoi An was on the itinerary, but we just had scheduled some walking tours, market places and leisure time. Leisure time was another request I had made in booking our tour. I knew Chrissy would want to spend one day on the beach or by the pool. Maybe it should have been the leisure time that should have given me the first hint that we would experience different things than we had in the other parts of Viet Nam. What really should have shown me that this was different became obvious on our drive through the rice paddies to this small city. In the paddies bordering the city woman worked their scythes harvesting the first of the years rice. Their straw hats bent over in the fields as they cut the rice straw with the curved blades. When we stopped to take a picture, a few of the ladies looked up and smiled at me, but quickly returned to their task.

Hoi An is small. It has only 80,000 people or so, but it actually felt smaller. The roads are narrow and the architecture stretches back four hundred years to when the Japanese were there. The architecture also reflects the Chinese and French influences that dominated the city for centuries.

Binh took us to a silk factory for our final stop of the day’s tour. Many factories, in Viet Nam do not have the look of a factory they look like houses. This had been true in the Delta with the candy factory, in the shadow of the Marble Mountains with the stonecutters and now in Hoi An with the silk. Even though it was nearing 5:00 pm a lady dressed in the traditional Vietnamese dress met us at the door and guided us into the factory. Every step of the silk making process was represented in the factory beginning with the eggs of the silk worm. It continued all of the way to the chrysalis stage and harvesting the silk from their cocoons. They then had some looms set up to show the weaving process.

In the back rooms of the shop they had ladies sewing elaborate pictures to be placed into frames as art work. One large picture of the Vietnamese country life about 4 feet by 6 feet was on sale for $4,500.00. It took one woman eight months to sew it by hand. In another back room were rows of sewing machine with tailors working on different orders. Just above this room was a room displaying the fabrics and samples of clothes that could be made on demand and delivered to the hotel by 8:00 am the following day. Another room downstairs had additional yards of material ready for sale. On the far side of this last room, under the eaves along the street a few ladies constructed silk lanterns.

That night, Chrissy and I had a nice dinner under the palm trees and stars of our hotel. The day began with a morning walk in Hue next to the pill boxes along the Perfume River and taken us through an American strong hold and a Viet Cong base before it left us quietly in a simple and sleepy town. Near the outdoor dining of the hotel, in what would be an area for a parking lot for the hotel was a small band shell. In celebration of Liberation Day, the Vietnamese were having a concert. The holiday marked the thirty-three years since the last American’s fled from the rooftop of the American Embassy.