About Last Night

by Marie (Last night was 03/04/15, just after midnight)
 
What a funny ole night last night was.
Chris and I were sharing a room in Hoi An.  I was still awake just after midnight.  Chris rolled over and said something - I'm not sure what it was, but my reply to Chris was. "Can you smell smoke?" She took a moment and then said "Yes".
 
We leaped out of our beds and opened the curtains.
There was a fire in the vacant block / rubbish tip just behind the hotel possibly 20-25 metres from our room.  The smoke was billowing up and just seemed to be hitting direct onto our window and the room had a hideously strong wiff of smoke in the air.  There appeared to be no one monitoring this fire. We were unsure what was going on.
 

Our conversation went something like this:

MD: Could it be an offering burning?

CD: At midnight?  There is no one around.

MD: Should we call reception?

Chris calls reception, granted all I can hear is Chris's side of the conversation and this is how it goes:

CD: Hello, there is a fire just behind the hotel and there is a strong smell of smoke in our room.

Male on other end of the phone says his bit

CD: No, we are not smoking in our room, there is a fire just behind the hotel.

Male on other end of the phone says his bit again

CD: I know we are not allowed to smoke in the room, we are not smoking.

Male on other end of the phone says his bit and tells Chris he is coming up.  Wouldn't have been 1 minute and he's nocking on the door.

I will call him EMP1 for Employee #1.

EMP1: Is ok, not in hotel.

CD & MD:  We know it's not in the hotel, but it is right there.

EMP1: Is ok, not in hotel

CD & MD: But it is right there

EMP1 gets on the phone and calls EMP2.  EMP2 arrives in a jiffy and speaks English a little better than EMP1.

EMP2:  This happens all the time, they are burning rubbish.

CD & MD:  Ok but no one is watching the fire, what if it gets out of control? Also our room wreaks of smoke.

EMP2: The hotel is full, we can't move you to another room, you'll have to put your fan on and close the window. But it is Ok, fire is not in the hotel.
CD & MD: But the window is closed.

EMP1 & 2 exit the room, Chris has a puff on her ventolin, we turn the fan on, turn the lights off and climb back into bed, planning our evacuation strategy in our minds.  (I was a fire warden at work for about 4 hours before I resigned from that post, so I was all gung ho in my mind on how we would flee the burning building!!)

About 20 minutes later, our phone rings, It is EMP2 advising us that water has been put on the fire and that it has been extinguished (Although the word extinguished probably wasn't used).  So Chris jumped out of bed and checked and he was true to his word, the fire was out.

This is the fire from just after midnight, taken from our window

This is the scene of the fire in the cold hard light of day.  Really, all those dry coconut shells are purely kindling!

 

At one point as this was going down, Chris did say to me "Why aren't the smoke alarms going off?"  My reply was "You can bet your life on it that none of the smoke alarms are even connected." 

 

Looking at the photo's now, it doesn't seem that bad, but last night with the flames, the embers and smoke straight into our room, it seemed a whole lot worse!!