Hoi An - December 11th

Today was a long day on the bus, almost 6 hours.  This is because the distance to our next stop is the longest of all.  All this travel means we are only cycling 30km today, which for us now is a walk in the park.  We head out along the main road and get some great views of the coast again, including yet another beautiful beach resort where we stop for coffee, but where the waves are massive.

We lunch at the My Lai museum which commemorates the massacre of locals by US forces in 1968. I honestly do not know enough about the story to comment, we only got the Vietnamese side of it, but obviously the Americans have their own explanations.  It took an hour to go around, followed by a picnic lunch, before we get on our bikes.

As I said the cycle today was relatively easy, although there was a little rain and wind, it was not as bad as it was the previous days, especially as the two sections were only 15km.  However I did almost come a cropper because my water bottle fell out when we hit a bumpy bridge.  This wasn’t the problem, what happened was that I braked, and put my foot down to pick up the bottle, but the bottle rolled under my foot and so I fell over.  I bumped my knee and bum, but as I wasn’t moving at the time it wasn’t too bad.  I think our guide, Chi, who was right behind me at the time and hit me came off worse (although his damage was to his bike only).

Other than that the day was uneventful, and we had another two hours on the bus to our hotel in Hoi An.  Our guide then walked us into town and showed us some places to eat and we went our separate ways.  I led a group of 8 looking for a restaurant from Lonely Planet, but the map was wrong (or I read it wrong) and instead we found a restaurant called Secret Garden, which was not marked anywhere, but which was very good.  We thought it was a bit expensive, but it turned out to be quite cheap when we compared to the others later.