The Hoi An Fish Market

Hoi An is coastal town in Central Vietnam. It is about 30km south of Danang and is famous for its abundance of tailor shops, its beautiful French architecture, and its excellent cuisine. However, my favorite thing about Hoi An is the morning fish market. The fish market is smelly, crowded, and packed with aggressive, pointy-elbowed (ouch!) old women selling and buying fish.

To attend the market, you must get up very early. By the time the sun is coming up, the market is already in full swing. Later in the day, the market miraculously transforms itself into a tourist hell – something like a miniature, low-budget version of San Francisco's Fisherman’s Wharf.


Tourist hell is a narrow gauntlet that must be run, while on both sides shop owners are coming at you saying, “You buy something.” Sometimes this is phrased as a question. More often, it sounds like a direct order! Having gone to the fish market in the early morning, and later returning only hours later to find tourist hell, I actually thought I had become disoriented and was on a different street!

In case you need to escape from a new-found parasitic twin at the market, there are always lots of water taxi’s standing by. You won’t need to find them, they will find you. My escape was facilitated by the woman in the lower left of the picture above (notice the betel nut smile!), but when I was dropped off, the woman in the track suit wanted payment too. Um, no!

So what is the appeal? The market is full of life: the good, the bad and the ugly. It is full of sights, sounds, smells and activity. One morning there was even a fight between some of the women over who got to buy a basket of fish. The women were yelling and grabbing the basket and the fish, while another woman was cracking up at the absurdity of it all.

What I like best is that the fish market is not there for the tourists (that happens later), it is all locals doing business and making a living. I find it much more interesting than the more easily found experience that I call, "Fisherman’s Wharfs around the world."