Stimulating the Vietnamese Economy

Hoi An has been our favourite stop so far. It’s smaller with a pedestrian friendly old town that you can wander around comfortably. It doesn’t hurt that it was warmer. We were in shorts and t-shirts pretty much the whole time.

Our drive from Hue to Hoi An included a quick stop at the Marble Mountain in Da Nang. Actually, we never really stopped in Da Nang, but you can see just from driving through how different it is going to be in a few years. All along the coast massive hotels are being built by the likes of Le Meridien. A little further down the road Colin Montgomery has just designed a new golf course. I only hope that some of the guests of these resorts actually get a chance to see Vietnam, that they don’t become gated communities with little outside contact.

Sculpture in one of the Marble Mountain caves.

Maybe it was seeing all this foreign investment in Vietnam, or just Katy’s love of a good deal, but once we arrived in Hoi An, it didn’t take us long to start doing a little economic stimulating of our own.

We knew before arriving that Hoi An is the place for buying clothing and it didn’t disappoint. I was able to get two made-to-measure suits and two shirts, all for what you would pay for just the shirts in Toronto. Katy did even better with a range of items from dresses, to skirts to jackets. A few of the items she had made had the women sitting at the table next to us quite impressed and asking for directions.

The trick now is getting it all home. We’ve managed to get everything in our luggage. Now we just have to hope it all irons out well when we get home.