Hoi An, though, is even stranger. This is the city of backpackers in tuxedos.

Hoi An is a small town about halfway between Hanoi and Saigon. It is just a few kilometers from the ocean, and its sheltered river port served as an important trading center for hundreds of years until it was superceeded by Danang, just to north. Trade brought in large Chinese and Japanese populations, and later the French. This resulted in a town filled with beautiful, unusual architecture, an amalgam of all these cultures.

It is a small, peaceful town. Easy on the eyes. Its good restaurants, laid-back atmosphere, and proximity to the beach tend to trap travelers here for a while.

All of that, however, places a distant second to the real star of Hoi An -- its tailors. Somehow Hoi An has become a mecca for custom-made clothing. Everyone in town has jumped on the bandwagon resulting in literally hundreds of individual shops that will make anything you want -- from Armani to Speedo -- in silk, cotton, wool, or exotic animal skin. They will measure every angle on your body, and you return just a few hours later to pick up your perfectly fitting outfit. It is cheap, too. Nice men's suits run $25-$35, women's dress start at $7.

Now, the synapses in my brain vaguely connect "clothes shopping" (or worse, "fabric shopping") with things like "massive dental work" or "bamboo under fingernails", but I must admit there is something addicting about this place.

Most travelers start small. Maybe they order one shirt or a pair of shorts. When they come back to pick it up they see how well it fits, and they think, "well, maybe just one more thing." The next day, same thing. This goes on and on and on. We have met several people, men and women, who stayed in town an extra 2, 3, even 4 days because they couldn't stop ordering clothes. One guy ordered 7 suits.

This creates some very atypical sites. It is odd enough to walk down the street and see a sweaty grizzled backpacker in Teva's trying on a tuxedo, but the conversations over beers in the evening are so strange they are almost scary. One night, while playing pool with a couple of working-class British guys from Brighton, I looked across the table to see one of them examing the inside of the other guy's shirt, saying in his thick accent, "She did a really lovely double-stitch there, didn't she?"

We got stuck in Hoi An not because of the clothes, but because of the rain. That drenching downpour we same to know and love in Hue was also hanging out here. When we arrived in Hoi An (in the rain, of course) the three blocks closest to the river were completely flooded. Hand-poled boats shuttled visitors to the hotels on those streets that tried to remain open. At no additional charge, that Great Travel Agent In the Sky was throwing a taste of Venice our way.

The flooding in town didn't bother us, but further upstream it had flooded out a bridge that led to some ancient ruins we wanted to see. So we waited. Each day we would book a bus to the ruins, and each day they would cancel the bus and say "maybe tomorrow." Waiting, shopping, more shopping.

One day, to escape the rain and the shopping, I decided to get a haircut. The haircut was OK and I should have stopped there, but then he said he would give a shave for $.50. I had a straight-razor shave in the States once and it was nice, so I agreed. Big mistake.

This barber was determined to give me my money's worth, so he gave me the most thorough shave I have ever had in my life. He shaved me from my forehead to my collarbone. Then around my neck to my back. He scraped and scraped long after any trace of shaving cream was left. I sat motionless, afraid to speak or move, afraid of permanent scarring. Images of burn victims came to mind.

Finally he stopped, flipped my chair up, and waved his hands. He was very proud.

Now, you would think at this point I would have learned my lesson. My face was a throbbing bright red mass of exposed nerves. Somehow, though, the thought of clothes shopping filled me with such horror that when he said "My sister give you pedicure. 10,000 dong [$.70]" I didn't say no. I had never had a pedicure in my life, but Sarah has and she described them to me as more like a footrub than anything. I pictured maybe a brief buffing of my toenails, followed by a long leisurly rubbing of my toes, arches, heels, lower legs. This sounded pretty good after two months of doing nothing but walking all day every day.

"OK!" I said, enthusiastically.

Sister came out and started by soaking my feet in warm water. Nice! It felt a little disappointment going from "Adventure Geoff" to "Girlie Geoff," but that didn't bother me too much as I closed my eyes, felt the warm water on my toes, and listened to the rain coming down outside.

Then, suddenly, bolts of fire shot up one of my legs. Sharp burning pain. I looked down to see her working my toenails over with a pliers-scissors type thing that must have been invented by a sadistic dental auto mechanic. Within seconds she had rendered my toenails to half their former size. She was twisting and pulling and cutting while I sat there with that same gasping look I get when I jump into a cold Minnesota lake in May, the day after the ice went out.

The cutting stopped, thank God, but then came the Death Pick. It was a metal spike she used to dig deep into that really sensitive skin that had until seconds before been covered happily under nail.

"OK! OK! All done! Stop!" I shouted.

By now my toenails were pointy little arrows, cut back on the sides almost to their base. I could feel the synapses in my brain quickly re-wiring themselves, neurons reaching out to connect "clothes shopping" with "Vietnamese pedicure."

Eventually the rain slowed down and the flooding subsided. We were able to see My Son, the ancient ruins of the Cham civilization that ruled southern Vietnam from the 2nd - 15th centuries. It was a neat site. Old brick walls and temples were covered in a tangle of jungle. Sadly, few structures remain because after surviving over a thousand years America bombed them to rubble 30 years ago.

The drive to and from My Son also provided a dose of adventure. The road had been closed because the bridge over the river had been completely submerged. When they announced our tour was finally a "go" I assumed this meant the river had gone down enough to expose the bridge.

I have to learn to stop assuming things.

Our bus reached the river and ahead of us I saw the road end at the bank. Stretching across the river were two parallel lines of small bouys. The river was muddy brown topped with frothy white foam, a rapids. It reminded me of what they show on the evening news in the States. When there is a flood, the news always shows that same shot of the house or the bridge being beseiged by water and then giving way, crumbling into a million pieces.

Our driver stopped briefly. Then, inexplicably, he drove us right into the river. Water rushed against the sides of our bus, but he puttered on. With horror, I realized that those parallel lines that I thought were buoys were actually the tops of the guard rails running along each side of the bridge! A bridge we couldn't see because it was completely submerged, being torn apart by the river beneath us!