Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I figured I'd shoot for the Holy Grail right away. “Yes. Ask him if I can watch the family
make noodles,” I said.
Let me get one thing straight: I was not looking to steal the recipe for cao lau noodles
and sell it on the culinary black market where foodies and chefs linger down dark alleyways,
waiting for a guy to open up his trench coat to reveal contraband recipes for sale. I'm just a
food-loving traveler obsessed with unraveling weird mysteries.
Momentslater,TranTanMan,theownerofTrungBac,stoodatourtable.Thaointroduced
me and explained that I was in town to learn about cao lau. Then he popped the question
about meeting Tran's extended family to find out how the noodle was made. “Absolutely
not,” Tran said, shaking his head from side to side. “No one watches!” And then he ran off to
greet a gaggle of tourists that had just streamed in.
“He's right,” Thao said. “No one watches. I don't think they have ever let anyone from
outside the family watch them.”
A couple of decades ago no tourist groups traipsed into restaurants in Hoi An. In fact, the
few travelers who knew about the town saw a very different Hoi An. It was a rundown back-
water. There was one place to stay, the Hoi An Hotel, which was more like a boardinghouse.
There were few restaurants, save for the usual makeshift eateries one finds in the alleyways
of every Vietnamese town. All that began to change when Lonely Planet included Hoi An in
its guidebook
Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia
in 1991 and
South-East Asia on a Shoestring
the
following year. The attention quickly cemented the town's place on the backpacker's grand
tour of Southeast Asia. Cheap and midrange hotels popped up in the late 1990s. And after
UNESCO designated Hoi An's historical central district (Ancient Town) as a World Heritage
site in 1999, posh resorts, most of them along the coast just outside town, laid out their red
carpets. Western-oriented Vietnamese restaurants followed soon after.
Thanks to all those tourists (and support from UNESCO), Hoi An is no longer the ram-
shackletownitoncewas;itsbuildingsglowwiththatrecentlyrefurbishedshine.Buttheloc-
al economy has benefited in other ways as well. Thao works at the upscale Nam Hai resort,
and as I went around town with him, we kept running into friends of his who were employed
by Nam Hai or other resorts. “Before, young people couldn't wait to get out of here,” he told
me one day over coffee. “Now we all have jobs and no reason to leave.”
All this development has put an indelible mark on the town. Walking through the streets,
flanked by one- and two-story buildings and ornate Chinese-style temples, you are accosted
by the usual “Hello” and “Buy something!” from vendors and “Where you going?” from
motorbike taxi drivers. But Hoi An also has a kinder, gentler way of assaulting the visitor's
senses: classical music wafts out of loudspeakers affixed to telephone poles throughout the
car-free center of town (
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
is a recurring standard), while the sweet
smell of incense seeps into your olfactory glands. If you factor in the upscale restaurants
