VN4 - Tourism begins in An Hoi

 VN4 - An Hoi (get fancy characters)

Another night, another 4 hours of sleep! Still feel pretty ok.  We woke up at 4:55 to Lou's mom flipping on the lights and yelling... and then apparently we weren't don't packing? I was done packing, but...   Anyways, headed out to the airport at 6, maintaining my string of only ever seeing sunrise on the way to airports AWK.  To my surprise, the airport part was headache-free. The domestic terminal is relatively small, the lines were short, and even escorting two elderly people on their third-ever flight was totally chill. 

The flight was somewhat-empty, and we were near the back, which meant I could jump to a window seat! Today is so much better than yesterday morning. It was a 1 hour flight, spent mostly soaring over the clouds that span the country, and when we arrived in Na Dang (CHECK) it was still early morning.

Lou had a driver pick us up, and we set off towards An Hoi - one of the oldest seaports in VN. I didn't know that at the time, nor did I know we were going to An Hoi... I'm just along for the ride for most of this.  There were some excellent half-built and abandoned highrise hotels on the way, but... I don't want to go to viet jail. Lou says I can probably bribe my way out of the situation, but that's never something you can count on. No promises though.

Before getting to An Hoi, we stopped for a basket boat cruise? tour? Experience.  Essentially, imagine a nice paddle through a beautiful grove of coconut trees, and then worked as hard as you could at ruining canoing.  Hydrodynamic stability? Hell no. We're making this boat perfectly circular. And since you can't read both sides of the boat anyways, we're gonna give you (your guide) a single paddle.  But none of those really ruin the experience.  How about once we get out of the grove and onto the river, you join 100+ basket boats!  And then, because the boats are perfectly round, lets spin them as fast as we can! WHILE BLASTING GANGNAM STYLE OUT OF LOUDSPEAKERS ON REPEAT. The spinning was almost enjoyable and mercifully brief, so lets take another crack at attacking kayaking....  KARAOKE FLOTILLAS!  Up until now, I could sorta see the appeal, but the karaoke flotillas were a deeper level of hell than even Dante found. Once Beatrice (or a desire to afflict as many tourists as possible daily) finally pulled us out of there, we got our turns to paddle.  I could keep it generally moving the right direction, mostly with J strokes (the guides use a figure-8 while changing the angle of their paddle, pretty clever) - Lou immediately started the circle game right back up.  Anyways, 3/10, definitely could be worse, and we've catapulted from too authentic into far too touristy. MAYBE ADD ANOTHER RHYME COUPLET THIS PARAGRAPH

An Hoi itself is a cute town on the river, and grabbed lunch (chicken and rice, the local specialty. It must be this specific version of chicken-and-rice, because that's been one of the staples on 4/5 of the continents I've visited). From there, it was only a few minutes ride to our hotel - which is quite nice. Not five-star or anything, but several steps up from your standard Holiday Inn.  After we checked in and dropped off the bags (and used a restroom with a real door! walls that reach the ceiling!) we immediately set off to wander the town.

I couldn't have been more correct about tourist-land, and the local town is almost entirely restaurants, bars, knickknack shops, and bars. And then street vendors for all the above. We did see the XXXXX Bridge, a japanese bridge gifted? to honor the good relationship between An Hoi and Japan (and the money coming out of the mercantile fleets docking here), which is mostly famous because it's on the $20 bill. Throughout this (and the canoing), Lou had me take dozens of pictures of her for instagram or whatever kids are doing these days. And she doesn't like the pictures I take of her because "they make her look short" (spoiler: she is short), so she would set the zoom, set the exposure, tell me exactly where to hold the camera, how to angle the lens... everything.   And then she'd complain that I'm a bad photographer. At this point, I'm not even her photographer, I'm a glorified bipod. Hey! There's that familiar lack of sleep. 

We spent a few hours on this fool's errand of a walking tour, seeing the same gimmicky shops (and bars, obvs) for blocks and blocks and blocks on end. Finally, we had to return to the hotel for the final event of the day. And caffiene, that blessed little pill of tolerance and happiness. We're going to a show! Like... a play or something.  Not really my cuppa, but this entire trip is an very intentional push out of my comfort zone and normal experience, so I'm still gonna send it.  We walked the mile-or-so there, and as old women with short legs aren't known for being very fast it took a while, even taking a sketchy shortcut through an alley and across a field. Basically, everytime I mention walking, assume we're at grandma-speed. Eventually, several bridges later, we arrived on An Hoi Memory Island.

Except for the lack of rides, this place is basically disneyland! "A Land of An Hoi Memories" or something like that.... What I thought was a play is actually 15 dance numbers! After the entrance mixtape?menagerie?melange?mashup? XXFIND THE ACTUAL WORDXX we entered the park, and grouped up for a fun martial-arts demo... then we wandered slightly further into the park to a kung-fu danceoff between a knife-fighter and an extremely athletic tiger! This repeated throughout the night, with different subsets of the 20 or so dancers putting on 14 numbers, ranging from beautiful (a ballet romance between the wind and the moon) to the bizarre (such as the anime jumprope danceoff, and a geisha show hosted by a drag queen), with most falling somewhere inbetween. They all finally wrapped up about an hour before the final show, and conveniently, there were restaurants throughout An-Hoi-Memory-Land! Whoever is behind this idea, they're really good at what they do. Bahn Mi is still great, so dinner was a success, and finally, it was time for the last show. 

And suddenly, there were hundreds of people in the park, instead of the two score we'd spent the last few hours with. And the final building was much bigger... and once we got inside, the final set seemed to be the size of a football field. Maybe I'll pull up the satellite imagery and check, because it's that big, you can see it from space [Editors note: Satellite imagery puts it at exactly XXXXX football fields in size].  The show itself was a total spectacle with ~100 dancers, and made use of a pond in the front as stage, prop, and reflecting pool. The whole show was designed with large-scale aesthetics in mind, and took us through the history of An Hoi as a metapor for life, with fleets of boats, glowing props, costume changes, beautiful music, and a total ban on photography of any sort.... There was even an elephant... but of course it wasn't life-size. It was //way// bigger.

Afterwards, we tried to book a cab home. But cabs aren't allowed onto the island, which is totally fine because they have a fleet of shuttles. Stretched out golf-carts that will drop you off at any of your hotels for ridiculously cheap. So even better than a cab, and Memory-land is raking in the profits. The whole Memoryland ecosystem is very well designed. TBH, I wouldnt even be surprised if our driver was one of the sailors dancing about lovers lost at sea.

Finally back at the hotel, Lou and I set off alone to see the nightlife. The riverside is filled with bars, and they are all blasting their music at each other. Apparently volume=profts. Or they just assume we all loved the basket-boats and want to recreate that experience for all of the tourists out on the river. The river was filled with lantern-lit fishing boats, taking tourists out for a short cruise, so that the tourists can each launch their own little origami boat, lit with a candle. It's a beautiful scene, straight out of a romcom or instagram highlight reel. So of course we had to take instagram photos. And of course they were all bad. The caffiene gave up on me, and I gave up on being the insta-boyfriend. I refused to take any more pictures and decided to walk home. Lou... I dunno, had to check her likes or something. Even walking at the grandma-speed my legs are locked to at this point, I left her miles (not literally) behind.  I had a hot shower and made it through multiple pages of my book before sleep claimed me.