At each stop in Vietnam, we have short tours booked so we can see the culture and lifestyles of the local people. Today we spent a few hours on a walking tour of Hoi An. This is a beautifully restored old town! It was granted UNESCO world heritage status to protect the town's "cultural heritage", which is seen as having global significance.
Unfortunately, that status isn’t totally a good thing. For more than a thousand years, the town has been an important trading port, and at one stage it controlled much of the spice trade with Indonesia. Since the 1990's, UNESCO has protected the buildings, and the old town is nothing if not charming and romantic, but it has also turned Hoi An into a major tourist destination.
So many of the shops that for hundreds of years sold spices, cobbled shoes, and sewed suits have been bought out by people wanting to cash in on the tourist trade. The town is full to the brim with tailors selling exactly the same clothes, shoe shops selling shoes imported from China, art galleries with the same pictures in all of them, restaurants and bars. It seems the UNESCO status has protected the look of the city, while driving away that much lauded “cultural heritage”.
