I woke up with Mona looking at my face, apparently she didn’t sleep through the sounds as well as I did, despite she using earplugs while I didn’t. I vaguely recall our neighbors where paranoid about missing their stop and basically had alarms two hours in advance, Mona confirmed this memory. Anywho, I get up and remove the curtains from the window and lo and behold a light switch. A little bit of reading and playing peekaboo with a local kid later we get off at Da Nang. I remembered to save my ticket and was happy for that since it got checked as we got into the station (but after we jumped off the train).

There was a sign for Vikto, which I consider close enough so we got in a cab and realized it was a lot warmer here, perhaps in the low-mid twenties. At the hotel, Hoang Trinh, we got a lovely room which we a few minutes realized had an window towards a kindergarden. We switched room quickly before leaving the hotel to scout the local area.

We found a bunch of locals eating some vegetarian dishes at a rather basic restaurant, it tasted great and was very filling, especially for the price of 1 USD. We strolled into the old parts of the town which looked a bit like I envisioned New Orleans looked back in the days. Some streets even banned cars which was making things even better. As we walked and looked into stores we met a tourist(?) kid, five year old or so, parents not in the immediate vicinity – coming towards us from the other end of the street while singing “I’m a lumberjack, and I’m OK”. Not what we expected.

We found the tailor that Claes had recommended, A Dong Dilk, it seemed a bit pricey and didn’t have many items in the showroom though but we would come back later for a proper visit. A bit tired we headed back to the hotel for a quick nap, which took slightly more than two hours. We decided we would try out this place some other people from the Ha Long Bay trip recommended – Cafe 43. Following others recommendations seemed to be working well so why risk a winning streak? The place was almost full, the food was ridiculously cheap, and the beer even cheaper – one freshly brewed beer was slightly less than 1 SEK. So how would this food taste then? The answer is awesome, potentially the best so far on the trip, the stuffed squid is highly recommend. We will definitely be back. Before turning out the lights at home we did some research around tailoring, and also saw that Claes and his wife were depicted on A Dong Silks homepage. Which really wasn’t that surprising.