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Published: August 7th 2007
What is with the saying 'same same but different' in South East Asia? Everyone seems to say it, hotels and cafés are named it and backpackers wear t-shirts with it printed on...but no-one seems to know what it means. It's a pointless phrase, it's not even funny and as we spend more time in South East Asia, it's annoying us more and more. GRRRrrrrr!!
So now we have got that off our chest...our 12 hour overnight bus journey from Hoi An to Nha Trang was 'okay', except for 2 tyres bursting, the air con breaking down and us being sandwiched between 2 annoying Americans in front of us who rudely rammed their seats into our stomachs before we had even left Hoi An and 2 annoying French behind us who kept shoving things into the backs of our seats! But for $7 a seat, what do you expect?!
Arriving into Nha Trang at 6am, there were many similarities between the resorts layout and Rio de Janerio. Considering the time of morning, the beach was jam packed with Vietnamese tourists playing in the sea, burying each other in the sand (which they often liked to do) and having picnics on
the beach. Later we were to find out this was quite normal for the Vietnamese who dislike the strong sun and so prefer visiting the beach at this time of the day or in the late afternoon. As we had come to expect with these 'open tour' buses, we got dropped off nowhere near the best budget accommodation, whilst we tried to locate our position on a - yet again flawed - Lonely Planet map, we put our bags next to a wall only to have a grubby Labrador puppy wee on our rucksacks.
As you would expect arriving at 6am into anywhere is not the best time of day to try and find a hotel, however, we were able to get a nice room for $16 including breakfast. Nha Trang beach is quite nice, however as Donna found out, the water is colder than you would expect and laying on our sarongs on the beach she somehow managed to find the only hypodermic syringe in the whole of Nha Trang! The beach vendors are a little annoying but no different to other beaches in South East Asia, although we did have one vendor try to sell us her
cute baby boy, we hope this was a joke!
We had been told that Nha Trang was THE place to come for partying, but we were not so impressed. The bars, (e.g. Red Apple and Why Not bars) have drinks offers to entice backpackers such as buy one cocktail for 25,000 dong and get one free, which we decided to try but 2 minutes into our drink we were being hassled by the staff to buy more drinks. The popular Sailing Club was 30,000 dong for a small (330ml) bottle of Tiger beer and based on this we decided to go to the local beer hoi bar which had 6,000 dong a litre fresh cold beer! We were warned about walking late at night in Nha Trang due to dodgy thieves and prostitutes who will mug you, but we never experienced this or even saw any prostitutes. But this isn't to say it doesn't happen, so we must have been lucky.
One day we walked to the Long Son Pagoda, reclining Buddha and big Buddha. It took about 40 minutes in the searing 33 degree heat but it was worth it when we got there. We were not
allowed to enter until the buddhist monks had finished doing whatever it was they were doing...it didn't look like praying but rather walking around chanting to a drum. Some strange bloke dressed in white volunteered to show us the way to the reclining and big Buddhas. After the 2 minute walk we thanked him and he promptly held his hand out and demanded we give him 200,000 dong for what he says was to feed the monks. First of all, that would feed a hell of a lot of monks, secondly monks receive alms (food from the local people) every morning anyway and thirdly the Buddhist philosophy is not about money. Buddhism everywhere in South East Asia seems to have been corrupted; it's all about the money. As you may or may not know, Buddhism is about the absence of greed and not at all about the acquisition of wealth or asking for money, but many Buddhists in South East Asia believe that the easiest way to get good karma and attain enlightenment is to throw as much money as possible at the monks! Anyway...we heard later into our trip that the same guy had pulled the same scam with
other travellers so watch out!!
Aside from this day trip to the pagoda we did very little else in Nha Trang. We were going to try the mud baths which we saw on other blogs but at 360,000 dong (£11) this would stretch our daily budget. This doesn't sound a lot, but all you get for this is to swim in some mud and a shower...we did enough of this on the Inca Trail.
It's maybe fitting then at this, our halfway point through Vietnam, that we make a couple more of our observations about Vietnam:
1. Many things in Vietnam have names which sound very rude to Westerners. Examples of this include Phu Quoc (pronounced Cock), Dung, Dong, Bich etc...you get the picture. See the picture of the SuperDong! This makes for several minutes of spontaneous and childish hilarity!
2. As we are moving from North to South, the people seem to be getting less friendly, the prices are rising and we are hearing more of thefts and scams of foreigners.
3. In tourist areas like Nha Trang, there is price fixing thing going on and there are few well stocked shops selling food yet go
1km out from the tourist area and you can find very well stocked large supermarkets.
Our next 4 hour bus journey takes us to a smaller beach resort further south called Mui Ne where we are promised sand dunes, canyons, an awesome beach, cheap hotels and the smell of fish sauce...
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C
non-member comment
Less friendly and more scam as you move down south?
This is absolutely opposite to what I've experiened.