Hoi An by bicycle: lanterns on the river, a dress in twenty-four hours, and the rice fields beyond the town

Hoi An is small enough to learn in a day and deep enough to spend a week not finishing, and the way to do both is a bicycle. Mine came from the hotel by the river, a heavy old thing with a basket and one gear, and for eight days it was how I went everywhere: into the old town in the morning before the ticket booths opened, out to the beach, out to the fields, back at dusk when the lanterns came on. I counted the bridges I crossed. Four, every day, one of them a bridge with a temple in the middle of it.

The old town

The Ancient Town is a grid of yellow houses, two storeys, wooden fronts, tiled roofs with grass growing in them, along a river that used to be the port for half of Asia. You buy a booklet of tickets at the gate and each heritage house takes one. Tan Ky Old House took my first: two hundred years in the same family, Japanese beams on Chinese brackets over a Vietnamese floor, and on the back wall, marks and dates in pencil for the floods, the highest at shoulder height. The Fujian and Cantonese assembly halls took two more, built by the Chinese merchants for their own people: dragon fountains, a courtyard, and under the roof enormous spirals of incense hanging like springs, each one burning for a month with a prayer on a red tag at the centre. The Japanese Covered Bridge is the one in all the photographs, pink, with its small shrine inside and a monkey at one end and a dog at the other, and it was the bridge I rode across most.

After dark the lanterns go on, silk, every colour, strung across every street and hung from every doorway, and the old town becomes a different place, softer and louder. I took the lantern boat on the Thu Bon the second night and again on the seventh: a woman rows you out into the dark with a paper lantern each, you light the candle and set it on the water and it drifts off to join a hundred others, which is more moving than it has any right to be. The second time I let mine go without a wish, just to watch it.

Eating, and making

The cooking class began in the central market at eight, where the fish were still flapping and the herb women were sitting behind heaps of green I could not name, and ended with me making white rose dumplings, which are shrimp in a rice skin pinched into a flower, and cao lau, the noodle that exists only here, chewy and brown, with pork and crackers and herbs, supposedly made with water from one particular well. I ate cao lau every day after that and counted the places: six, all different, all good. Banh mi from a stall by the market, the baguette warm, the pate and pickles and chilli, eaten on the bike.

The tailors are the other thing Hoi An is for. There are hundreds. I chose one with a woman at a sewing machine in the window, picked a linen from a bolt, was measured in four minutes, and had a dress to try on the next morning, adjusted by lunch, finished by evening. Twenty-four hours. It fits better than anything I own. I counted the fittings: two. I counted the times I was asked if I wanted a second dress: five.

Out of town

My Son is an hour inland and you go at dawn to have it before the heat and the coaches: a valley of red brick towers built by the Champa people over nine centuries, half of them bombed to rubble in the war and the craters still there between the ruins, the jungle growing back into everything, and on the morning I went, mist on the hills and nobody but a man sweeping. The Hai Van Pass, the next day, is the mountain road north between here and Hue, up through cloud and down to the lagoon at Lang Co, with old concrete bunkers at the top from two wars and a view that stops conversation. Da Nang, the city half an hour up the coast, has a market where I bought nothing and a bridge shaped like a dragon that breathes fire at the weekend, which I did not see, because I was asleep.

The beach, An Bang, is a twenty-minute ride through the rice paddies, and in January it is grey and empty and windy, the sea rough, the deckchairs stacked, three cafes open and one surfer. I liked it more than I would have liked it in June. The ride there is the real reason to go: flat green fields on both sides, water buffalo, a woman in a conical hat bent double planting, and the vegetable village at Tra Que, where the herbs are grown in beds fed with weed from the river and you can smell the mint from the road.

The quiet one

The museum I would send you to is the Precious Heritage gallery, a French photographer's portraits of the people of Vietnam's fifty-four ethnic groups, with the real costumes beside the pictures, in an old house in the town. Free, quiet, and I stayed an hour. The Thu Bon basket boats, the round woven bowls the fishermen use, are the opposite: a man spins you in circles in the coconut forest while music plays, and it is ridiculous, and I laughed the whole time.

What I know now

Get the bicycle. Go into the old town before nine and after dark, and let the middle of the day belong to the fields. Buy the ticket booklet and use every coupon. Pick a tailor with someone sewing in the window. Go to My Son at dawn. And let the lantern go without a wish once, because the river does not need instructions.