waterfalls and fishing villages

After the bottle of wine last night, we headed over to this bar called the Dog Bar. It's owned by an Aussie guy named Jimmy. We met a couple of older ex-pats guys and a Vietnamese lady who runs tours. She had the CUTEST puppy, so little. We played with it for awhile and chatted with people. We had quite a debacle on our way home. Jimmy was being an ass to our taxi driver- some ex-pats have this entitled attitude toward people where they live that is totally uncalled for and disgusting. Jimmy seems to be one of those people. Anyway, the taxi driver was taking us to our hotel and we thought he passed it. So we tried to tell him that and he drove all the way back to the bar! Then when he talked to the lady there, she said he thought we wanted him to come back, when really we just thought he had passed our place. Ooops. Linguistic barriers can be troublesome at times :-) We finally made it back and passed out. Actually I watched the Wire first, as usual... That show is so good.

In the morning we got breakfast then laid around reading next to the beach for awhile. We decided that we wanted to check out a fishing village across the island called Ham Ninh. We got a taxi and headed in that direction in the afternoon. Our taxi driver looked like a taller, Vietnamese version of John Leguizamo. So strange. Anyway, he stopped at a place he called the "stream" and asked us if we wanted to see it. We realized that these were the waterfalls we had heard about. The Lonely Planet claims that there is a ten minute hike up to the waterfalls. Lonely Planet failed us this time, because the hike was more like 20-25 minutes and it was ooh so humid. It's all jungle-like on the walk up so the heat is just trapped in there. But we made it to the waterfall and it was quite pretty.

We got back in the taxi and headed to the fishing village, Ham Ninh. This village was really cute- lots of fishing boats on a long cement dock, a market selling fish stuff, seafood, and pepper, and a restaurant. We sat down at the restaurant and ordered some crab steamed in beer. It was good, but as I've mentioned before crab is so labor-intensive to eat. It was yummy, though, and you know it's fresh when you've just seen them alive in the container at the market!! We sat there for awhile and enjoyed the view. Heather bought a necklace with a pearl- this area's famous for pearl farms- and some black pepper- also famous for that. We took some more pictures then got back in our John Leguizamo cab and headed back to our side of the island.

We read next to the beach for awhile then ate a late dinner. We went to bed early because we have a long day of snorkeling ahead of us tomorrow!!

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