Crackers in the room
for breakfast again, then Kate spent some time sorting out our next
hotel (in Da Nang), so it was about 11am by the time we made it
downstairs and back on our bikes. We had reserved one of yesterday's
bikes – the one with a cushion on the rack at the back – along
with another that had a toddler-sized seat on the back that Zoe
managed to squeeze her slightly larger-than-toddler sized backside
into.
We rode back to the
beach but this time we turned left just before we got there and went
in search of a restaurant called Cay Me, which had been recommended
on TripAdvisor, and which we eventually found. It was pretty basic
(with some of the worst brickwork I've ever seen), but the food was
good and afterwards, the guy who served us said that we could leave
our bikes there, so we locked them up and walked down a little track
to the beach, which was virtually empty. There were some sun loungers
set up right at the top of the beach and some big umbrellas set up
closer to the water, so we dragged a few of the former down to one of
the latter and then started to strip off. Again, it was overcast,
but again, it was plenty warm enough to make the sea look very
inviting and we were all soon properly immersed. Again, the girls
couldn't get enough of the warm water, and I found a couple of empty
coconuts to keep them completely amused. But eventually Kate and I
decided that we had had enough, so we all wandered back up to Cay Me,
where the girls had some mango pancakes.
Back at the hotel,
we all had showers and then we walked into Hoi An. One of the dishes
we ate at Cay Me was the traditional banh mi, a piece of
baguette filled with pork and a variety of other fillings. As we
walked through the outskirts of town we came across a guy selling
banh mi from a cart (he was even freshly grilling the pork),
so we grabbed one to take the edge off. When we got into the centre
of Hoi An we happened to look up and saw some people eating on a
rooftop terrace, so we set off to see if we could join them. We
quickly tracked the restaurant down – it was above a shop selling
some really cool movie-related paraphernalia (more of which later) –
and climbed the stairs to the top. It was quite a warm night, and
being right up top of the building meant that we enjoyed a light
breeze as we ate some decent food while listening to backpackers
drone on inanely about their travels and some wholly inappropriate
music.
It was still early
by the time we had finished the meal, so we went looking for
somewhere to have a cheap beer, but unfortunately our musical
travails weren't over. Everywhere we went we were followed by bad
tunes – be it loud dance music pumping from dark bars, badly played
live music blaring from boats moored on the waterfront or the insipid
muzak being piped to speakers set along the streets – and after a
while we gave up and headed for home. As we left the centre, we
finally escaped the music and found a pleasant little restaurant with
some tables on the street, so we stopped there and ordered some mango
pancakes for the girls and beers for us. While we played cards, we
eavesdropped on the conversation going on at a nearby table. A young
couple from Queensland had bumped into two blokes they knew and they
were blokily discussing their impressions of Vietnam, the places
they'd been, the things they'd seen, the beers they'd drunk and so
forth – a masterclass in low-brow youthful bravado. So we couldn't
help smiling when the discussion turned to their studies – one of
them was a medical student while another was about to start a PhD in
chemistry, providing a complicated explanation of his planned
project, which involved measuring the behaviour of methane as it
reacted with other compounds at timescales measured in femtoseconds.
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