The road we are currently living on in Hoi An is quiet and very residential. Scooters buzz up and down during the day and there is someone who sells _pho_ every morning from the moment the sun has started to rise. Communal bins are battered polystyrene boxes reinforced with yellow and green-striped tape that are collected around five days a week. Children play badminton in the street, as well as football.
And we have a ‘fruit man’!
The fruit man has been around several times since we’ve been here and we have bought oranges, apples and a large custard apple. As is common with a lot of traders who offer their wares via a scooter you hear them before you see them because of a looped recording played at high volume. This particular seller has a trailer attached to his scooter, and the fruit displayed on a wide-bed-type construction with a make-shift roof over the top. As someone who is only just getting used to riding a scooter solo, with no trailer, flat-beds or custard apples, it is quite astonishing to see these people whizz around with so much ‘ballast’, be it food or boards with sunglasses attached, or rugs, or electrical goods
I am hoping to see the fruit man in the next few days.
Rice Festival
The Hoi An Rice Festival, also known as the “Hoi An Dong Rice Planting Festival” and the “Cam Chau Rice Field Festival” took place earlier in January. The annual festival offers hands-on agricultural experience such as rice planting, plowing and water fetching and a general demystifying around the process and life-cycle of the rice paddies, whilst informing how integral the practice is for the local community.
It did give me slightly unnerving _Midsommer_-vibes upon entering, due to the hand-woven signage as well as the tipi-like structures that had been erected from straw, hinting towards a slow, ominous build-up throughout the day before culminating in a horrific act of sacrificial violence. But luckily, no human sacrifice became apparent.
On the contrary, there were stalls, local food and examples of traditional rice baskets, as well as straw-made scarecrows complete with large bamboo leaves and traditional a Vietnamese hat — like some kind of Gormley-inspired Angel of the Far East. It certainly made me steer clear of the paddies.
The rice paddies are such an integral part of Hoi An — as they are for numerous areas in the country, of course — that it was amazing to join locals and tourists, travellers and residents in reflecting upon that which underpins the place, sandwiched between the river and the sea, a vast patchwork of shoots emerging from shallow water with narrow paths criss-crossing them like veins.
— J ✻