In March and April, we'd like to stay in Hoi An so we need an apartment.
We want to learn from our experiences in 2016 where we simply chose a flat on Airbnb and rented it for 6 weeks fix, too careless. Also, there were not too many offers at that time. Not only that reality differ from the photos but behind our house, more precisely our bed room, they kept chicken incl. a rooster. When lying down, we heard these scratching noises and the idiot rooster have no sense of timing and screeched all night. Since then I've had a cock-screeching phobia.
So this time we will rent nothing that we haven't seen and proved. For this, we have planned 4 days in Hoi An before going to the North to viewing apartments. 4 days are not much therefore searching and agreeing on viewing need to be organized upfront. But, this was not that easy as the landlords were only willing to share availability details earliest one month before moving in.
Quite some time ago, I came across the Hoi An Rentals group on Facebook and joined. Apartments, houses and rooms are offered and requested there for longer rental time. By and by, I have saved some flats that I like without applying any search criteria yet.
When it came to planning, we look into possible location areas in more detail and select from my favorites list. We don't want to stay within the Old Quarter for too much hustle bustle. We are no one who stay 2 months by the surfers' beach. It left with the areas in Tra Que, the vegetable village, Cam Thanh, the coconut village and east of the Old Quarter in Cam Chau, the biggest District. We associate Cam Thanh with the wonderful memory of a trip we took with our friend back then. We had been taken to the cooking school by basket boat, a historic round bast fishing boat, along a quiet river where lots of palm trees grow, and had spent a lovely day there. Quite remote, it's amazing that there are the most rental offers there. Let's see.
Two weeks prior to the planned viewing date, we found only one flat where we could arrange viewing. According to the landlady, they are service apartments, even 2 loft apartments are on the rooftop level. On the photos, they look extremely luxurious. Let it be said in advance. The property is a slightly better homestay. Homestays are guesthouses or B&Bs where rooms are rented out in the family home. There was only one studio available, i.e. no separate bedroom, but with a tiny kitchen. By normal standards it would have been ok, but disappointment is inevitable when such photos are offered and you are then confronted with the reality. However, as we had no alternative, we didn't refuse immediately.
At the same time, I wrote directly to various people who had offered properties in the FB group in the past. I also took another look at the listings on Airbnb. We were still unsuccessful until a few days before D-Day. I was getting impatient, but my husband said that if worst came to worst, we could go to a hotel as an interim solution. Yes, there are plenty of hotels, which reassured me a little.
At the same time, I actually found a villa on Airbnb that consists of 2 houses with a shared courtyard and 3 bedrooms. Hoping that we might be able to rent just the front house with the kitchen, we arranged a viewing. Instead of a villa, the house also had the layout of a homestay. There was one room with the kitchen and table, no living room and a various number of loose bedrooms, the pool was not usable. Of course, you can't rent just one part. He also charged a horrendous price according to European standards. So again no success.
2 days before the planned viewing, I published a post in the FB group myself and listed exactly what we were looking for. Over the next few days, I received 20 replies, wow! On closer inspection, however, the offers were rapidly reduced because of course nobody read my criteria or simply ignored them. There were lots of rooms from homestays and hotels. Many of them don't even look good in the photos. The bathroom is always critical in Vietnam. The Vietnamese standard shower consists of a small nozzle above the toilet without a partition. There were 3 apartments that we wanted to look into in more detail. One of them is too far out, I still don't know the location or price of the second one and we want to visit the third, a photo with a nice entrance.
First I ask my usual 3 questions: where, how much and photos. She (I only knew this later) communicated in Vietnamese via FB Messenger, so I had to transfer every sentence into Google Translate and have it translated. It's a good thing this tool exists though - everyone here uses it, by the way. In response to my 3 questions, she sent me a video of the inside of the house. We saw that it is a new house. I asked again where the property is located. Then, after a delay, she sent me a second video of the outside of the house and the street around it. You can see that it is a quiet area. I asked again where, then she sent something I couldn't translate or find on Google Maps. I asked her to send me a link, she sent me a link from some map application that I neither know nor own. I asked, changing strategy, if we could see the house. She said that she had to get household items for the apartment first. So yes or no? "Yes, today" I asked her for a link in Google Maps so that we could find the house. She did and we set off. It wasn't until we got closer to our destination that we saw that Google Maps was showing a huge open space as our destination. We couldn't even find the destination road. I wrote her this and attached a photo of where we were standing, at the junction of a very well known wide road. She wrote that she was walking up from the house to meet us and that she had no internet outside her house. I wrote that we hadn't found her street yet. These replies were repeated several times and I was about to give up. Then she wrote that we should come to number 229, so we walked another 10 minutes in the heat, hoping that there would be the turn-off to the destination. We met there and I tried to talk with hands to get her show us her location on Google Maps. She pointed here and there, just nothing near us, but says it's only 5 minutes away and pointed in the direction where we came from. We said let's walk then, but no, you can't walk, you have to take a motorbike. We said that we don't ride motorbikes and apparently there was no solution then. We then stopped the transaction. I checked FB later and she had never posted the house.
In the end, a real estate agent, who I had also written to, got in touch and asked more specifically what we were looking for. He then offered us two properties to view, one in Cam Thanh and the other about 2 km east of the Old Quarter. Not only was the apartment in Cam Thanh totally run-down and did not match the photos, we were also shocked to see what had happened to the tranquil Coconut Village. Not only have apartments been built on a large scale, but the tranquil river with the coconut palms has now become a showplace.
The other property, "Fullmoon Apartments", where we are now staying, is a serviced apartment in a brand new apartment hotel, so we are the only guests at times. It's not quite what we wanted, it doesn't have a kitchen and is more expensive, but the main advantage is that it's new, everything is new and the bathroom is European style. The surroundings are beautiful, one street in front of us is the "Thu Bon River" which flows through Hoi An and one street behind us is another small river. We can reach quite a lot on foot, get the apartment cleaned twice a week and a small breakfast every morning and feel comfortable so far.
P.S.: The last reply to my FB ad was a woman who would like to be my girlfriend during my stay. If I let her know, she would come to me immediately. I wonder what that means. 😉
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