One Evening in Hoi An: Lanterns, Rain and a Dragon Carrot

I had meant to travel with my daughter. She was unwell at the last minute and decided not to come, so I flew down from Hanoi to Da Nang on my own — a short domestic flight that deposits you in the north of a busy modern city with Hoi An still 40 minutes away by road. It was raining quite heavily by the time the taxi pulled into the old town, the kind of November rain that settles in along this stretch of the Vietnamese coast and doesn't hurry to leave. I knew enough to expect it; November is the wet season in Hoi An, and the town has a long acquaintance with water.

The hotel was a small place, the sort where you take your shoes off before going inside. It felt right for somewhere with lanes this narrow and floors this clean. I left my bag, looked out at the rain for a moment, and decided I had not come this far to sit in a room.

The old town at night, even wet, is something. Silk lanterns hung over the lanes in reds and yellows, their light caught in the puddles on the stone streets. The place was busy — full of visitors, a lot of them from Japan and China, moving slowly along the shophouse fronts, buying things, photographing the lanterns. Motorbikes threaded between groups of pedestrians at the edges of the pedestrian zone. Hoi An's Ancient Town is small enough that you can walk its entire historic core in well under an hour, which means you keep circling past the same lit facades, the same turn towards the river, the same view of the Japanese Covered Bridge from the far bank. Each pass looked different in the rain.

At some point a man on a motorbike pulled alongside and asked if I wanted him to take me around the town. I did. We spent a couple of hours going through the streets and out along the river — past the covered bridge with its lanterns and its small shrine, past the riverside restaurants with their terraces reflected in the wet road, out to quieter stretches where the old town thins into ordinary neighbourhood and back again. The rain had eased to a fine mist by then. It was a good way to see the place: faster than walking, lower than a car, with the smells and sounds of the town coming at you directly rather than through glass.

We stopped at a small restaurant. I do not remember how we came to stop there — whether my driver knew it or we just turned in — but I am glad we did, because there on the table near the entrance was the thing I remember most clearly from the whole trip: a carrot that had been hand-carved into the shape of a dragon. It was perhaps the size of a man's fist, orange and intricate, the scales worked out with a small knife, the head raised, the tail curling back on itself. Someone had made this not as a display piece but simply as part of the restaurant's preparation, the way a chef somewhere else might fold a napkin into a fan. It was extraordinary in its ordinariness — a few minutes of a cook's skill, left on a plate, lit by lantern light. It is one of those details that stays with you precisely because it was not meant to impress anyone.

The evening ended with a small negotiation over the motorbike fare. My driver wanted what seemed to me, at the time, like quite a lot of money for a couple of hours of informal guiding. I paid what I paid. He seemed unhappy with it. These things happen, and I am not sure, looking back, that I was in the right of it; an evening like that — the rain, the lanterns, the covered bridge, the dragon carrot — was worth more than I probably gave.

The next morning I took a taxi back to Da Nang airport and flew on to Ho Chi Minh City. I had been in Hoi An for less than 24 hours, which is not enough — the town rewards a longer stay, and there were things I did not get to: the assembly halls in daylight, the market at dawn, the basket boats on the river. But the evening I did have was complete in itself. The Ancient Town at night in the rain, with a hand-carved dragon on a restaurant table and silk lanterns overhead, is as good an introduction to Hoi An as any.

This is David Dand's own account of a November 2019 visit to Hoi An, edited for narrative clarity. The places, people and moments described — including the carved-dragon carrot and the motorbike ride in the rain — are from that visit.

This is David Dand's own account of a November 2019 visit to Hoi An, edited for narrative clarity. The places, people and moments described — including the carved-dragon carrot and the motorbike ride in the rain — are from that visit.

Sources: Hoi An - Vietnam Tourism • Top 10 Hoi An Festivals, Vietnam (2026 Guide) - hoianit.com