If you’ve ever seen videos of people spinning around in a giant coconut boat in the water, they are likely from the famous “coconut boat” tours in Hoi An. We loved the whole experience; our guide took us crab fishing along the way and taught us Vietnamese rowing chants. Because of the popularity of these tours—which doesn’t make them any less fun by the way—it can be difficult to find a good one. We loved ours through Nga Coconut Basket Tour, which was half the price of many of the other ones we saw. This is my guide for the coconut boat tour (also called the basket boat tour) in Hoi An from my experience.

Cost: $3 USD per person

Duration: 1 hour

Commute: 20 minute drive

Best Time to Go: Early morning

WHERE TO BOOK

While you can book one of these tours on site simply by driving here and inquiring at the shops along the river, these are likely to be much more pricey than good ones you can find online. We booked through Nga Coconut Basket Tour, and to book we just contacted the lady who runs it directly through WhatsApp. Our experience was much smaller and less touristy than a lot of the other tours we saw. It is run by a singular lady, and she has one or two guides working for her who take private groups one at a time. It was just us two and our guide, compared to the huge groups of 20 plus people we passed by occasionally on the river.

COST

Our tour was only 80K VND ($3 USD) just for the tour. We payed an extra 100K VND ($4 USD) to spin in the coconut boat which was optional, and ended up tipping our guide 200K VND ($8 USD) because we liked him so much. We also wanted to tip because our tour was significantly cheaper than other ones we saw that tried to pull us in. 

GETTING THERE

Getting to the coconut boat tours is only a short 20 minute drive from the Hoi An old city. Our bike taxi actually dropped us off at the wrong one on purpose to try and make money. Apparently this is pretty common here, we had heard stories of this happening to other travelers. A crowd of people from the shops where he dropped us off approached us saying “coconut boat, coconut boat” and were trying to charge us 200K VND to do their tour. This was much more expensive than the one we had found and besides, we had already booked. Luckily, the lady we booked with came and picked us up on her bike after we texted her our situation on WhatsApp.

OUR EXPERIENCE

Once we finally made it to our tour, our kind lady let us use the restroom, and then we walked down onto our basket boat from the dock! We had booked our tour for 8:00 AM in the morning so the river was still relatively empty for the time being. Our guide was this happy old Vietnamese man who didn’t speak a lick of English, but he clearly had such a bouncy energy about him. He rowed us down the river in his boat, stopping at various photo spots and gesturing for us to give him our phone so he could take our photos. The guy even climbed out of the boat onto the muddy bank one time to get a good angle. He also insisted excitedly with gestures that we should wear the traditional Vietnamese nón lá hats for some of the photos. 

Around halfway into our journey along the river we started to hear loud hype music. We turned a corner and there were a couple Vietnamese guys in coconut boats spinning in them rapidly and dancing to the music as a couple other tourists watched from their own coconut boats. They were blasting the music from a HUGE speaker on a little island dock. Then they stopped and offered us a turn to hop in their boats with them to be spun. Both of us agreed after paying 100K VND ($4 USD). Our guide cheered us on. It was hectic, I gripped my bench so hard my knuckles whitened. After the crazy spinning our guide took us crab fishing. We used little bamboo poles with chicken hanging from strings attached to the end. I caught a couple (to the delight of our guide) before releasing them and we continued on our way back down the river.