Vietnamese New year – how is it celebrated in Hoi An?

Tet Nguyen Dan (known as ” Tet ”) is the most important Vietnamese holiday. This is the period when the Vietnamese celebrate the Lunar New Year (the date is taken from the lunar calendar). It is a movable feast, which falls at the end of January or in early February – at exactly the same time as the Chinese New Year. This year the Vietnamese have celebrated the New Year on January 28. It is said that the celebration lasts normally 3 days, but in practice we saw it continued up to 1 week and it significantly differed from the typical New Year celebration in Europe.  There are no grand balls and parties, it rather resembles the Polish Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when gifts are handed in to relatives who gather together at a big table covered with lots of nice food. Let’s have a closer look at it then 🙂

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Waking up in Descending Dragon Bay!

Just imagine that you spend a night on a boat in a cozy cabin being surrounded by 1,900-2000 rocky islands and islets with caves and grottoes .. And in the morning what wakes you up is an unearthly view from your cabin window and it turns out to be one of 7 New Wonders of Nature… Ha Long Bay or Descending Dragon Bay is situated in the Northeast/Dong Bac region of Vietnam and it has been considered the UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994. This incredible place is visited daily by a large number of tourists, who most often go there for 4/6/8h trips looking from the distance like herrings packed in small boats entering the bay. They all are taken to the same place, so called Surprising Cave, the most spectacular cave in the bay. We did not want to make this kind of hop-on-hop-off trip in a cramped boat. Instead we decided to establish a closer contact with the Ha Long Bay and spend there almost two days and one night – the boat cruise provided us with many unforgettable memories!

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