Da Nang, Vietnam.  After another rocky sea day we arrived in a small commercial port near Da Nang.  Last night we had a pre-dinner James Bond 007 show with martinis.  Tom felt right at home.  We also had dinner with John and Cathi Begg who had been on the Circle South America trip with us in 2012.  The show was really terrific with great character acting including a all the Bond theme songs, dancing, a fight scene and acrobatics.
Our tour went to Hoi An, a world heritage site.  We had a good tour guide and she had memorized all our names but she very much stayed on the party line.  Our first stop was a marble factory, really amazing stuff but we only had 15 minutes, barely enough time to visit the "happy room" (restroom)!  We would have liked to have more time at this stop.  Hoi An was interesting, full of tiny shops that had once been part of the ancient trading village, but the historic part was rather limited.  There is a lot of garment making and other textile manufacturing in Vietnam so those things are the best bargains.  Not sure if the items are seconds or perhaps pilfered?? but we bought a nice North Face Gore Tex jacket for $28 and two Kipling purses for $23. We stopped at a beautiful Vietnamese restaurant for a great lunch.  It was nice that all the dishes were labeled so we knew what we were eating! It was apparent that the government in trying to develop Da Nang as a resort area but is failing.  There are a couple of golf courses a a few resorts are open but did not appear to have much going on.  There were a large number of incomplete projects that looked abandoned.  There was far less traffic in Da Nang compared to Saigon.  Some of the US infrastructure is still in use, mainly bridges and the airport.  We also saw "China Beach", a favorite of GI's during the war.
We left the port at 4 pm on our way to Ha Long Bay, then about 5:30 we heard a call for a medical emergency in one of the lounges.  While we were at dinner an announcement was made that the injured passenger (later heard it was a possible stroke) needed to go to a hospital and a helicopter evacuation was not possible due to the 40 knot wind and 3 meter swell we were experiencing so we were turning around to go back to port. This will put us at least 5 hours behind schedule so we will not be able to have our tour of the Ha Long Bay monoliths tomorrow. Apparently we were not able to get into the commercial port and had to go farther to the actual city of Da Nang.  It was around midnight that we finally got underway again.  It was a very rough night and things were falling over in the room and it was very noisy with lots of banging noises from the ship and difficult walking just the dozen steps to the bathroom!

Corner gas station for scooters

Lantern shop in Hoi An

One of the buffet tables at our lunch stop

Dragon bridge in Da Nang