Hoi An Bamboo Basket boat ride

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4th Nov 2018.
The Senior Citizens .
The thung chai, or “basket boat”, traces its history back to the French colonial era. As the story goes, the French arrived in Vietnam and began levying taxes left, right and centre – including a tax on the ownership of boats. Most of the poor Vietnamese fishermen who depended on boats for their livelihood could not afford to pay the taxes, so they invented a new type of boat: the thung chai.

Hemispherical and woven from bamboo, the thung chai is a variety of coracle – a small, circular boat traditionally used in parts of the British Isles as well as India, Iraq, and Tibet. The fishermen who built them argued that these were not boats at all but baskets – and therefore couldn’t be taxed. Their crafty plan seems to have worked, and ever since then these domed vessels have been a feature of the landscape of central Vietnam – lying scattered across beaches and (more recently) ferrying tourists from A to B.

Constructed by hammering strips of bamboo into place, the boat is then coated in waterproof resin made from coconut oil, tar or (increasingly) fibreglass. With regular re-coating, each boat can last decades – longer even than the people who make them!