Eyes Up in Vietnam: Rainstorms, Fish Guts, and Unexpected Friendships

So jumping in to Vietnam, we kicked off our trip by flying into Vietnam from Hong Kong after taking a 16 hour flight between Dallas and Hong Kong.

So we flew to Hong Kong, then took a shorter flight to Da Nang airport, landed in Da Nang, Vietnam, and then headed into the city of Hoi An where we stayed at the most lovely Airbnb.

And just dove headfirst into so many fun experiences, which brings me to one of the first recommendations I want to make if you are planning or thinking about planning a trip to Vietnam is to hire a private driver.

And I know this sounds super bougie, and so I want to preface this with this is incredibly affordable locally.

It costs about $80 a day for us to have a private driver who picked us up from the airport, transferred us and all of our luggage, the 45 minutes to Hoi An, and then acted as our private tour guide and took us around the entire day to to so many different local spots.

And not only was this incredibly valuable because of his expertise, he helped us find the best restaurants.

He helped us find all of the places that these different experiences were, which one thing we learned during our time in Vietnam is that a lot of things are off the beaten path and would have been harder for us to find on our own.

And the few things that we did try to find on our own took a lot more time.

so we were able to see a lot more and do a lot more because of his expertise but then on top of it it was also really incredibly fruitful relationally which i will get into more but i highly recommend hiring a private driver lee was our driver for our first day and then one of his friends long drove us around a few days later And it was so worth every penny.

I will drop his information for his business in the show notes if you want to save it for your own future trip to Vietnam.

But a few things that Lee took us to do that were just highlights for us is we went to an old podcast.

pottery village where generations of potters have worked in this small area of Hoi An.

There were countless pottery shops lining the street, and we actually got to go learn how to make pottery hands-on on a potter's wheel.

This is something I have always wanted to do, but in the States, the classes have just been out of our budget or time commitment.

And this was a fairly quick experience.

We spent about an hour total at the shop, but we actually got to try and learn how how to make some small cups or bowls or little mini vases hands-on i made a little espresso cup and the whole experience cost about 15 for our family of six and then we also learned how to traditionally prepare rice paper over an open fire that was fed by the husks from the rice then they used the burnt up husks as organic fertilizer this level of stewardship and these practices was really incredible But it was so fun for our kids to actually get to spoon out the rice milk and then spread it out and cook the rice paper and then turn that into rice noodles.

We even got to try some rice crackers made out of the rice paper that we had made.

There's actually a really funny video on Instagram.

If you want to see any of this with your own eyes of what this looked like, it was really cool.

But there's a funny video of me essentially inhaling some really spicy soy sauce while eating one of these rice crackers on Instagram.

Save to my Vietnam and Cambodia highlight.

But it was just such a cool experience for the kids to get to do that hands-on.

We also got to get hands-on on a local farm and learn traditional farming practices.

We got to do a market tour.

And then the person that had taken us to the farm and the market tour also took us back to their family home.