The Anti Tour

We wanted to see some of the sights, but we weren't interested in going on a full blown tour where you see things that you aren't that interested in.  The booking lady kept referring to it as a 'City Tour' but we knew what we wanted to see, so we asked for a car and a driver so we could pick from the tour what we wanted to see.

The first stop was the Trà Que Vegetable Village, about 3 kms out of town.

...and this is why we don't want to go on an organised group tour.

The gardens were amazing.  So organised and well maintained.

They start out with the seedlings which are covered over with palm fronds to protect them from the elements - what a great idea.... talk about making the most of what you've got.

Some are then covered with a light shade cloth and others are left out in the open.

They've set up a watering system both by using these baths of water and tubing....

.... and the old skool method of watering cans.

 Oi Trôi Oi - check out the size of this bug!

All the villagers work together on the veggies share in the spoils.

We found one lady working hard on the lettuce......

Then she popped her head up.....

and would you look at that.... it was Chris all the time!

 This chap was watching us take photos and kept posing with his rake. 

I'm not sure if I have to mention this to you or not, but it was hot.  So hot in fact that this little herb was not doing so well.

This is a vegetable version of how we were feeling.

 Our next stop was to have a look at the beach.  There are a couple of beaches in Hoi An, but the one that used to be the main one has since eroded, so they've moved all the hotel's private beaches and the public beach about 3 kms up the coast.

You can hardly see the beach for the huts and chairs!

I'm wondering if these could possibly be the lifeboats in case of emergency? 

Cua Dai is the original beach with all the erosion.....

 There were still people sitting there under the shade of the trees and some even swimming....

Even though this was their view.....

It's a real shame as this is a gorgeous place to sit in the shade.... and there are shops here as well.

The "tour" so far had been our driver dropping us off near the entrance of the veggie village and letting us find our own way and driving us to 2 beaches.  The last thing we wanted to see was a fishing village.  Because we suck at Vietnamese and our driver's English was worse than our Viet, we couldn't quite get across the words fishing village - even though the lady at the hotel had written them down, we showed him pictures of the village in the tour brochure and I tried using all sorts of miming..... but it must have finally twigged (probs because of the miming) and he drove with semi confidence until we got to a road, where he wanted to turn into but instead just looked down the road, decided against it and then took us to the bridge, where he stopped and then pointed over yonder to where the village was..... so he knew where it was, but just didn't know how to get to it, so we just looked from the bridge - about 1km away.   

After that, we suggested that we go back to the hotel..... where they gave us a discount on the price.