Sam and I didn’t actually go straight to Hoi An after leaving Hue; we stopped at the beach. Hoi An is a river town, but it’s just a couple minutes from the ocean by car. Tourists often stay at An Bang Beach, but we found a little guesthouse a mile up the coast on Ha My Beach. It was one of the more bizarre places we stayed in Vietnam. Sandwiched between two fancy resorts, Minh and Nhat had trouble finding it. Once we got there, we found the owner, his mother, a manager, and an aging Long Beach surfer who had lived in the hotel for the past year.

We loved and hated the guesthouse, which is called Ha My TT. It was very cheap compared to other options around Hoi An, and was on the beach. Not close to the beach, but directly on it – if you stepped out of the lobby you were on the sand. The water was a little chilly, but I had some fun playing in the waves. The beach itself was a great place to lie around. The guesthouse was virtually empty, which was both peaceful and slightly eerie.

What kept us from really enjoying Ha My was food, or the lack thereof. We had read that the guesthouse was flanked by cheap seafood restaurants, but these seem to have been razed to make room for new development. We were left with little more than one noodle soup vendor in the morning and a mediocre rice joint. The low point came one desperate evening when we finally found one woman selling hard-boiled eggs that ended up being fertilized eggs. We ate potato chips for dinner.

If there were more to eat, I think we could have been very happy at Ha My TT. If I could do it over again, I would go into Hoi An first, rent a motorbike, and take it to the hotel – with a bike, the area isn’t at all isolated. But the way the area is being cleared for development, I don’t know that I will have another chance to stay at this strange little guesthouse.