Four days in Hoi An: the port that survived because the river silted up

Three nights in the old trading port, on foot and by bicycle, with the Marble Mountains in the middle and a last morning on the beach

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Hoi An
Places
8 across 4 days
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Hoi An was the port of central Vietnam for six hundred years, first for the Cham kingdom and then for Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Dutch traders who came for silk and ceramics and left behind the streets you now walk down. The river silted up, the trade moved to Da Nang, and the town simply stopped. That accident is why the old quarter survives at all, and why UNESCO listed it in 1999.

The old town is tiny: a few hundred metres square of yellow-washed shophouses, merchant halls built by Chinese guilds, a covered bridge and several hundred tailors. It is closed to cars, largely closed to motorbikes during the day, and can be crossed on foot in ten minutes. It is also, by any honest measure, extremely touristed, and the way to enjoy it is to be out early, disappear in the middle of the day, and come back when the lanterns are lit.

Four days gives the town two days at its own pace, one day up the coast for the Cham museum and the Marble Mountains, and a final morning at the beach. Bicycles cost almost nothing and are the right way to do all of it that is not in the old town itself.

Highlights

  • The Japanese Covered Bridge, built in the early 1600s and on the back of the twenty thousand dong note
  • The Fujian assembly hall, all incense coils and painted dragons, dating from 1757
  • Cao lau, the town's own noodle dish, which is not properly made anywhere else
  • The Marble Mountains, five limestone hills full of Buddhist shrines and caves
  • The Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang, founded in 1915 and still the best of its kind
  • The old town after dark, with the silk lanterns lit and the traffic gone entirely

Where to stay

Hoi An

Hoi An sits on the Thu Bon river a few kilometres inland from the sea, and the old town runs for four or five streets back from the water. Tran Phu is the main one, with most of the assembly halls on it; Nguyen Thai Hoc and Bach Dang are the two below it, and Bach Dang is the riverfront where the restaurants and the boats are. The covered bridge closes the western end. That is the whole of it.

The buildings are the reason to come. Merchant communities from Fujian, Canton, Teochew and Hainan each built their own assembly hall here, and several old family houses have been lived in continuously for two centuries and are open with the family still upstairs. The mix of Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese carpentry in one street is not something you see elsewhere in the country.

It is also a town that knows exactly what it has. Every second shopfront is a tailor, a lantern shop or a cafe, the boat touts are relentless, and between ten and four in high season the main streets are shoulder to shoulder. None of that makes it less worth seeing. It makes the timing the whole game: early mornings, long lunches, and evenings when the lanterns come on and the place is briefly beautiful again.

Day by day

Day 1 in Hoi An

The Japanese Bridge and an old merchant house

Arrive, buy the old-town ticket, and spend the late afternoon on two things rather than five.

The covered bridge at the western end was built by Hoi An's Japanese community in the early 1600s, about forty years before the shogunate's closed-country policy called them all home. There is a small temple built into the side of it, and it appears on the twenty thousand dong note. A full restoration finished in 2024 left it looking startlingly new, and there was a public row about the paint, which will settle as the weather gets at it.

Then one of the old houses. Tan Ky has been in the same family for seven generations, with Japanese roof beams, Chinese poem panels inlaid in mother of pearl, and flood marks on the wall of the back room that go well above head height. A family member shows you round in about fifteen minutes and hopes for a tip.

Eat by the river as it gets dark. The lanterns come on around six and the whole town changes character.

  1. 17:00

    Japanese Covered Bridge

    Religious

    One of the five sites on the old-town ticket. Go late in the afternoon or early in the morning: at midday there is a permanent queue of people photographing it from the bank.

  2. 18:00

    Old house of Tan Ky

    Visit

    Two hundred years old, still lived in, and the best of the merchant houses on the ticket. The tour is short and the tea at the end is included.

  3. 19:30

    Dinner on Bach Dang

    Eat

    The riverfront restaurants trade on the view and charge for it, but the setting once the lanterns are lit is worth one evening. Order cao lau and something grilled in a banana leaf.

With more time: The night market on the An Hoi peninsula, over the footbridge, sells lanterns, street food and a great deal of tat, and is livelier than the old town after nine. The boats along the bank are cheap and pleasant if you agree the price before you step in.

Day 2 in Hoi An

The Fujian hall, Quan Cong Temple and the market

Be out by half past seven. For an hour or two the old town belongs to the people who live in it: the market unloading, the noodle stalls setting up, and no coaches at all.

The Fujian assembly hall on Tran Phu is the grandest of the Chinese halls and the one to spend time in. It was built in 1757 for the Hokkien community and is dedicated to Thien Hau, the sea goddess who protects sailors, which tells you exactly what the men who paid for it were worried about. Coils of incense hang from the ceiling burning for weeks at a time, each with a paper prayer attached.

Quan Cong Temple, at the eastern end of the same street, is smaller and older-feeling: a courtyard, a carp pond and a fierce red-faced statue of a Chinese general worshipped for loyalty and integrity. It sits opposite the market, which is where the morning ends.

The market food court is the cheapest good meal in town and the place to try cao lau and com ga side by side. After that the streets fill up, so take the afternoon off.

  1. 08:00

    Phuc Kien Meeting Hall

    Visit

    On the old-town ticket. Go first thing, when the incense smoke catches the light through the roof and there is space to stand in the main hall.

  2. 09:30

    Quan Cong Temple

    Visit

    Also on the ticket, and twenty minutes is enough. Shoes off at the inner door, and the courtyard at the back is the quiet bit.

  3. 11:30

    Central Market

    Eat

    The food court at the back has a dozen stalls doing one dish each, with pictures and some English. Cao lau, white rose dumplings and a bowl of mi quang between two people is the order.

With more time: The afternoon is for the tailors, a cooking class or a swim. If you would rather keep sightseeing, the Museum of Sa Huynh Culture has the pre-Cham burial urns dug up around the town and is on the same ticket, and the traditional arts house puts on short music and bai choi performances twice a day.

Day 3 in Hoi An

The Marble Mountains, Cham sculpture and the Dragon Bridge

A full day north. Hire a car and driver for the day or take a taxi each way; it is 30 km and the road is flat and quick.

Start at the Marble Mountains, five limestone outcrops rising out of the sand halfway to Da Nang and named after the five elements. Thuy Son, the water mountain, is the one you climb, and it is riddled with caves that have had Buddhist shrines built into them, including one enormous chamber with a hole in the roof that drops a column of light onto the altar. There is a lift if the steps look unappealing. Go early, because there is no shade on the summit paths.

Then the Museum of Cham Sculpture, founded in 1915 by the French archaeological school and still holding the best collection of Cham stonework anywhere. Sandstone altars, dancing apsaras, elephant-headed gods and a great many breasts and lingams, all salvaged from temple sites across central Vietnam. An hour, and it makes My Son far more legible if you are going there.

Stay for the evening. The Dragon Bridge over the Han river is exactly what it sounds like, and on Saturday and Sunday nights at nine it breathes fire and then sprays water over the crowd standing at the head end.

  1. 08:30

    Marble Mountains

    Nature

    Two hours including the caves and the pagodas. Wear shoes with grip, take water, and buy the separate ticket for the Am Phu cave at the bottom if you have the energy.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch in Da Nang

    Eat

    Da Nang's own dish is mi quang, turmeric noodles with a small amount of intense broth, pork, prawns and a sheet of rice cracker crumbled over the top.

  3. 14:00

    Museum of Cham Sculpture

    Culture

    An hour is plenty and the labels are in English and French. The Tra Kieu and Dong Duong rooms hold the pieces worth crossing the room for.

  4. 20:30

    Dragon Bridge

    Architecture

    Lit up in changing colours every night, with the fire and water show at the weekend. Stand on the eastern bank, upwind of the water jets unless you want to be soaked.

With more time: Two ways to extend the day. The beach at My Khe, across the river from central Da Nang, is a long flat stretch of sand and the easiest swim on this coast. Or go up Son Tra, the wooded headland north east of the city, for the giant white Guanyin statue and a view back down over the bay.

Day 4 in Hoi An

An Bang beach and banh mi

Cycle to the sea for the last morning. An Bang is four kilometres north of the old town on flat lanes through rice paddy, and the ride takes about twenty minutes.

The beach is a wide arc of pale sand with a row of restaurants and beach bars behind it, most of which will lend you a lounger if you eat or drink something. The water is calm from spring through summer and rough in the autumn. Erosion has taken chunks out of this coast, so the sand is narrower in places than the photographs suggest.

Ride back for lunch. Madam Khanh has been making banh mi on Tran Cao Van for decades and the queue moves fast, which is the correct combination for a last meal before an airport run.

  1. 08:00

    An Bang Beach

    Visit

    Bicycle parking costs a few thousand dong at the entrance lanes. Go before nine if you want the beach quiet, and pick a restaurant at the northern end where it is less built up.

  2. 12:00

    Madam Khanh - The Banh Mi Queen

    Eat

    Pork, pate, pickled vegetables, coriander and chilli in a baguette that has been through the charcoal. Cheap, fast, and better than anything you will get at the airport.

With more time: With a slower start, the Thu Bon river villages are a good cycle: Tra Que, the herb-growing village north of town, and Thanh Ha, the pottery village to the west, are both under half an hour on a bicycle and neither is on a coach route.

Before you go

Getting in

Da Nang is the airport, about 30 km north, which is around 45 minutes by road. It has domestic flights from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and Da Lat, and international ones from Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong. A private taxi to Hoi An runs to a few hundred thousand dong and is the one occasion in Vietnam where agreeing a fixed price beats the meter; shared shuttle buses cost a fraction of that.

There is no railway station in Hoi An. Trains on the north to south line stop at Tra Kieu, about 15 km away, and at Da Nang, which is the more useful of the two because everything connects there. The overnight train from Hanoi to Da Nang is a good way to arrive.

Coming from Hue, the road over the Hai Van Pass takes about three hours by private car and is worth doing in daylight for the coastal views, with a stop at the Lang Co lagoon on the way down.

Getting around

Walk in the old town and cycle everywhere else. Bicycles rent for a token amount by the day and many hotels lend them free, and the ride to the beach takes about twenty minutes on flat ground.

Motorbikes are banned from the old town between 08:00 and 11:00 and again from 13:30 to 16:30, and on the 14th and 15th of each lunar month they are kept out in the evening too, when the streets fill with lantern-lit games and music instead. Those are the best nights to be here.

Boat touts work the riverfront hard after dark. A short paddle out with a paper lantern to set on the water is pleasant and cheap; anything sold as a tour is neither.

The old town ticket

Entry to the historic quarter works through a single ticket sold at booths around the edge of it. One ticket admits you to a choice of five of the roughly twenty-odd heritage buildings: the assembly halls, the old merchant houses, the small museums, the bridge and a performance at the traditional arts house.

You will be asked for it at the door of each of those. Wandering the streets, eating, shopping and photographing needs no ticket at all, whatever a persistent seller tells you. Choose the five with some care, because the buildings vary enormously in quality and the weakest of them are dusty rooms of unlabelled pottery.

When to go

February to May is the best stretch: dry, warm and not yet fierce. June to August is hot and the beaches are at their best. September to November is the rainy season and the town genuinely floods, most often in November, when the river comes up over the streets nearest to it and boats replace bicycles for a few days.

If you are here in the wet months, book somewhere a few blocks back from the water. Hotels handle it calmly, and the town does not close, but a ground-floor room by the river is a gamble.

Food and tailoring

Three dishes belong to this town. Cao lau is thick, chewy noodles with slices of pork, greens and croutons in a very small amount of broth, and the story locals tell is that the noodles need water from one particular well and ash from Cham Island, which is why it never tastes right elsewhere. Banh bao banh vac, which menus translate as white-rose dumplings, are translucent parcels of shrimp topped with fried shallots. Com ga, chicken rice with turmeric and herbs, is the third.

Hoi An has hundreds of tailors and the quality ranges from excellent to regrettable. If you want something made, go on the first day rather than the last, expect at least two fittings, and be sceptical of any shop that promises a suit overnight.

Hoi An is a small town that has been very good at one thing for four hundred years, first trade and now visitors. Four days is enough to see past the second of those to the first.

Da Nang, half an hour up the road, is the practical hub for whatever comes next: an hour and a bit in the air to either Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, or the coastal railway in both directions if you would rather watch the country go past.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

How many days do you need in Hoi An?
Two full days covers the old town comfortably. Four is better if you want a day in Da Nang, a morning at the beach, or a trip out to My Son, and it is also long enough to have clothes made properly.
Is My Son worth the trip?
Yes, if you have any interest in the Cham. It is a Hindu temple complex about 40 km west, built between the fourth and thirteenth centuries and badly damaged by bombing in 1969. Tours leave at dawn to beat the heat and the crowds, and it takes half a day. Seeing the Cham museum in Da Nang first makes it far more rewarding.
Do I need the old town ticket?
Only to go inside the heritage buildings, and one ticket covers five of them. Walking the streets, eating and shopping are free, whatever you are told at a booth.
When does Hoi An flood?
Most often in November, and sometimes in October. The river rises over the streets nearest to it for a few days at a time. The town keeps running and hotels move guests uphill, but book a room a few blocks back from the water in those months.
Is Hoi An too touristy?
The old town is very busy from mid morning to late afternoon in high season, and every other shop sells the same lanterns. It is still one of the best preserved trading ports in Southeast Asia. Be out at seven, take the middle of the day off, and come back when it is lit.
Should I get clothes made?
It can be excellent value and it can be a waste of money. Go on your first day, look at finished work rather than a catalogue, expect two fittings, and do not agree to anything that has to be finished in twenty-four hours.