On our way down from Hue we stopped at several places. The first was a small old bridge near hue. It had been built by order of a queen mother as a gift for the town. Near it was a museum of agriculture. We got to see the process of noodle making. Everything from rice beating, to smoothing, to cutting up and cooking. The second place we visited was a mountain pass that had been in use for a long time. A tunnel had been built by the Japanese, and it was the longest tunnel in southeast Asia, but the bus was too large to safely enter, and so we took the pass, plus, it was pretty. The second to final stop was a quartz statue carving place/garden. People would come and buy cool statues and rocks. And the final one was a mountain temple, in the middle of a city. That worked because the mountain was just sticking out of the city of Dan Ang. The mountain was famous because of the smooth white rocks that naturally appeared on the surface. These rocks are still known by most as quartz. On the mountain we walked a bit, had a coconut, climbed some rocks, and saw the temple. There was an elevator right up the side of the steep mountain cliff, so people in wheelchairs could still go. There were also renovated ancient statues hidden among the mountains. We hiked down the stairs on the side of the mountain.

The Hoi An old town has existed since the late 1700s. Originaly it was the town, now it is just a quarter of the current town. The old town attracts a lot of tourism, because of all the craftswork being done there, but mainly because of the countless paper lanterns that are turned on every night. Our visit to the old town was brief. We walked around, looked at crafts, bought the paper lanterns Camille had been bothering about. We saw a lot of stuff, from sports backpack clones, to bamboo root carving. We stopped at a house that was about as old as our house in Brimfield. There we drank tea and bought a cute wooden fat pig carving. Then we walked to a bridge that had been built by the Japanese, then flattened to be able to run cars over it, and then arched again when the old town became cultural heritage. The old town itself is mainly composed of narrow streets and alleys. The buildings are made of wood and stone. Many of the buildings were museums dedicated to something or other, silk, farming, fishing. However many of them had people still living in them.

Speaking of living, we were staying in a small house brief walk from the beach. We were originally going to be somewhere else, but it was having renovations done, and so we were put in a fancy

neo-futuristic house next to a construction site. Near the house was a clothes washing place with the sign: have washed clothes here. Jim and I joked about how it sounded like: have spotted Bigfoot here. The beach near the house would fill up with people doing push-ups, sit-ups, and about everything else, at about 5AM and be nearly empty the rest of the day. That and the fact that there were no fat people indicated that the people of Hoi An were encouraged to go out before work and do fitness.

One day we went to an archaeological site called My Son (mee-songh). It was a functioning religious and political center around the 4^th century. During the war it was used as a hiding place for the Vietcong, because of that it was bombed by Americans and most of the temples were totally destroyed. The ones that remained had no plans to rebuild it by, and so they remained crumbling. Now people are trying to keep them in shape by keeping them up with metal poles.

The day after the visit we took a plane back to Hanoi. In the airport we saw several commercials for a place called Cocobay, the commercials included cartoonish depictions of tourists as pigs doing stuff at a resort.

In Hanoi we stayed with some of Camille's friends, Megan and Jack. Megan and Jack's dogs were called Huey and Cloey. Huey was an extremely affectionate dog, while cloey was an exited and protective dog. Megan, Jack, Camille and I went on a long walk to and interesting cafe, this cafe was mostly inhabited by tourists, but the food was great. Downstairs was an interesting coffee making machine that would drip the coffee through a spiral tube to cool and distill it. After we returned we hung out at the house and then went out to dinner at a great Vietnamese restaurant. The next day we took a plane to Hong Kong, and thus ended our trip in Vietnam.