Hoi An is such a wonderful, relaxed and beautiful place, we decided to stay an extra day here.
By chance, the 1st March is full moon, and every full moon (14th of each lunar month) is a a lantern festival in Hoi An – and it was heralded by busloads of tourists coming into town. We noticed an unusually large contingent of Japanese/Korean tourists – in addition to the unusually large percentage of french tourists.
For the full moon festival, they leave off all the lanterns in town after dusk (until 9pm) and only have lanterns on the boats and people putting floating lanterns into the river – an amazing spectacle. (to be shared with way too many other tourists, but still wonderful).
The town itself is also during the day wonderful – the architecture, its preservation (thanks no doubt to it being a UNESCO Heritage Site), and many of the townspeople opening up their private homes to be viewed by tourists makes it wonderful to just meander through the streets of the old part of town. Outside of the old part of town (which is probably about 10 blocks by 5 blocks in size – quite a bit to visit), the town is very much like many other Vietnamese towns that we have visited….
As it is difficult to put into words how nice I found this place – here just a sample of the pictures in the 2-1/2 days….
