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Full Moon Festival, Hoi An, Vietnam

Our first full day in Hoi An started on a sour note. During a lovely breakfast in a cafe…

(Deeds with a huge mug of Earl Grey tea, and my lovely cappuccino, not iced, but hot, and a wee bit painful to hold)

…I decided to see if the cafe had Wi-Fi, since our hotel didn’t. And that was when I got the fateful email from our neighbors back home that we had been robbed.

I walked across the street to this rock…

…and had a good cry. Since I was thinking I had lost 5 years worth of photos of my kids.

But still I stubbornly resolved to enjoy the day! By golly! I was going to enjoy it!

Hoi An is a gorgeous town. It was not damaged by the Vietnam/American War. The buildings are beautiful and old. Some of them are in the French Colonial style, and some of them are from even before that, in the traditional Vietnamese style.

Actually Hoi An was a happening place between the 15th to 19th centuries,; it was the center of commerce for all kinds of goodies, like textiles and spices. Ships from many places came in to Hoi An to trade.

Lots of Chinese merchants came and never left. These Chinese are so assimilated with the Vietnamese today that they speak Vietnamese as their mother tongue.

However, the large Chinese population has held on to its own religions traditions, having built some fancy Chinese temples. But I’m getting ahead of myself because we didn’t visit those until the NEXT day. So hold on a minute…

Jojo wanted his picture taken with this bearded monument. Sorry but I forgot what it was about, except it was some kind of Russian-sounding name. The man was nick-named “Bazik”, I remember that part.

Hoi An was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999, and the town has taken measures to preserve the historical things that make it unique.

One thing that I appreciated was that certain streets are closed to cars. Motorbikes can be walked through (engines turned off), and bicycles and pedestrians are okay.

After nap time, we had dinner at Streets, a restaurant project from a not-for-profit initiative that provides training in hospitality and tourism for street kids and other disadvantaged youth.

The food was good, the service was friendly, and I love knowing that my money is going toward a higher purpose. I will always be willing to pay a few dollars extra to eat at restaurants like this.

Deeds liked the peanut sauce they brought out along with some yummy flat bread.

Unbeknownst to us, this day was also the Full Moon Festival in Hoi An, something that happens once a month (the 14th day of the lunar month, to be precise).

On Full Moon Festival days, businesses shut off their electric lights in favor of candles and lanterns. I guess motors aren’t allowed either, so motorbikes and cars and boat engines are silent.

People put paper boats into the water, kept afloat by a little Styrofoam, carrying candles into the darkness.

We paid a skinny lady with missing teeth and a smoking habit a couple of dollars to take us out in her row boat for 30 minutes. Jojo was very enthusiastic about the idea, as he had been asking to go “row the boat” ten or twelve times since seeing the (warf?) full of wooden boats.

Luckily there was a spare paddle in there that he could “row” with. I held on to the end because I was worried he would drop it into the water and the skinny lady would be irate.

It was so peaceful out on the water. The minute we pushed off, the loud celebratory music faded to a tolerable level. I think every event in Southeast Asian culture involves music at eardrum-busting decibels.

The novelty of the whole experience didn’t end when we had to lay completely flat in the bottom of the boat  (twice) in order to not be decapitated by a bridge.

What an experience!

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