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Published: November 28th 2007
PLEASE NOTE I uploaded 2 blogs within a few hours of each other last time, one for Han Oi with the traffic videos and one for Hoi An with the flood videos. Some people thought there was only the last one Hoi An, so you may have missed one. I am traveling with a laptop so I do them as I go and when I get good internet access I upload what I have done, so often I will upload more than at one time, like this time I am uploading this one and Saigon and Mekong Delta at the same time.
Nha Trang
Its only when we arrived at Nha Trang that we realized how different each region of Vietnam was. Han Oi was vibrantly busy, colourful with a mix of village atmosphere and city. Hoi An an ancient authentic village and Nha Trang is like a beachside resort. All very same same but different!
The beach has white sand and normally blue water (we have brown of course due to the recent flooding). The roads are sealed and the beachside pavement is wide and lined with palm trees, seats, fountains, with a couple of expensive
Sailing Club
Our home when in Nha Trangresorts and restaurants. But the water is violent (like Napier) the surf fights against being sucked back into the ocean with the desire to break on the beach. There is no way this beach is for swimming.
On the other side of the road the town is same same, a mixture of old and new buildings, roadside cooking, restaurants and souvenir shops including a few beach wear shops. Unfortunately there is nothing to buy, once you take wood out of the equation there is not much left that appeals. There are a few upmarket looking bars and restaurants in this town to cater for the tourists and expat business owners, in fact we sore quite a few white restaurant and bar owners (not sure how that happens in a communist country). Traffic is less, although being a pedestrian on the road is second nature to us now. The food and drink is slightly more expensive, but you can get an hours massage for $8, a facial for $4!
We have had 2 fantastic days of sunshine, and a couple of drizzle.
The People We posted a parcel back yesterday after being directed by 6 Post Office agents
around town, mostly backwards and forwards to each other, as they can only manage up to a certain weight. We finally found the main post office and after filling out 5 forms, telling her the content was mainly cloth, listing items and the clerk packing it for me, we left. That afternoon she rang the hotel and then visited us with 2 DVDs we had brought in Thailand (copied of course - crap quality - but had filled in some spare hours). She had seen I had listed these and unpacked everything, taken them out, re-packaged and then traveled to our hotel to give us the DVDs back!! I was amazed at the trouble she went to, imagine that happening in NZ!! Apparently Customs would have picked up DVDs and noticed they were copied and sent the package back to the post office, so basically it would never have been received.
We notice the people in the South are more tourist friendly and the children all say Hello!
Food We spent 4 days here and spent most of our time at this flash beachside restaurant called Sailing Club indulging in their fantastic curries. That is how bad
Barber
Getting a haircut and shave at the Barbers on the street! the Vietnamese food is, we are eating curries before we head to India for 3 months! Chocolate brownie, ice cream sundae - yum yum. Main courses are like $10.00 and desserts $4 but it’s worth it. Carl is making me go Mexican tonight, Christ all the way to Vietnam to have corn chips! (if you are visiting it was the best Mexican I have ever had - run by a french man in vietnam! Called El coyote Tex Mex, 76 Hung Vyoung Street.
An average meal in Vietnam for us would be approximately NZ$9.00 and consists of:
Plates of:
Chicken with Chilli and Lemongrass
Pork and vegetable stir fry
Prawns in tamarind sauce
Rice
2 x beer
Breakfast is always included in your room, but normally it is just a baguette (French stick) with egg or butter and jam, or the Vietnamese breakfast of Phu (yes pooh!), although I love noodles for breakfast this stuff has a funny taste.
Accommodation We stayed at Nha Trang Beach Hotel, great location, few steps and across the road to the beach and Sailing Club. The room was fantastic, it was huge, very clean and had street and ocean
views (I can recommend room 603). But beware all rooms are very different, even in same price range, the first one we got on 10th floor stunk so much we had to ask to move. Just US$25.00 (everything is in US here). Don’t let the gold bedspreads put you off, just take them off! Would recommend to budget travelers definitely.
Nha Trang Beach Hotel Due to the floods the Hoi An hotel had only charged us US$25 per night instead of $35, so it meant we had some spare. We have just found this new site Agoda.com which has same hotels but cheaper than Asia Rooms, it came sometimes be a lot cheaper. It had the Asia Paradise had a special for US$38.00 if you booked in advance, well yes you would have to be organised for that so we ended up having to pay $53.00 but still cheap for what we got, so we spent 2 nights there. We were desperate for some consistent and fast internet connectivity to upload blogs! They have direct connection in your rooms so you don’t have up/down/up/down with the wireless. It was great, view, new, modern, clean - very luxurious! Equivalent to any 4
Pavement Bar
Where the vietnamese and budget tourists drink! star in NZ except 2 big beds!
Asia Paradise Hotel Anyway quiet time here, off to Dalat now but flights full so we are taking the bus. The open buses here are amazing you can get like from one end of the country to the other for like NZ$30.00 and hop on and off when you like. We paid US$6.50 from Nha Trang to Dalat and that is a 5 hour trip (so they told us!)
Da Lat
The Bus! 5 hours - yeh right! We expected to be in Dalat at 1pm and got in at 4pm! Dalat is a hillstation, they originate from years ago when expats needed to get out of the high temperatures during summer, so were like cooler places to holiday. Now the Vietnamese holiday there, well those that can afford a holiday that is. So anyway back to the bus, obviously we had to go up hills, lots of hills, being a hillstation. Well this bloody bus could only muster up 10km up the hills - I could have walked it quicker! So we got to what we thought was the top after 2 hours of 10km winding through
the hills and it was flat road . We saw a roadside - 10km to Dalat - hooray yes we are nearly there, 10km will take no time……..until around the corner…….another bloody hill. It took us an hour to travel the last 10 km!
Don’t use TM Travel - luckily we had booked our other bus travel and tours through Sinh Café they could not possibly go any slower - or could they?
The Town This is not what I expected, I thought it would be more authentic and village like, I don’t know why. It was in a valley, had a lake, a couple of fancy European style hotels on the hill, huge European style buildings, heaps and heaps of quest houses/hotels, a few bars and restaurants in town along with the normal smelly food market, and not much to do, one day was enough. But we could wear our jeans - the weather was like home - and the prices were dirt cheap again! Some days we just cannot spend NZ$100. But it was good to stay and eat in places with the Vietnamese; it is really their holiday town and not the tourists.
Men at Work
Men Digging Hole - thats 1 hole and like 10 men! We stayed at the Sinh Café hotel which was fine - 2 king size beds and was only NZ$30.00, good location near the lake and restaurants and bar strip, but I did not like the smell in the room, I think it was the duvet inner. Getting used to 2 queen/kingsize beds in our room though!
We caught the bus to Siagon - an 8 hour trip - and it was! The bus was modern, nice seats, free water and peanuts, and it went fast up the hills! I would recommend Sinh Café for budget travelers, we also used their tours from Siagon and expectations were exceeded.
Sights One of the most amazing sights on the bus trip was how they were tar sealing the road. On the side of the road was a big open fire with 5 big black drums on the fire - they were heating the tar and spooning this on the road with a tin tied to the end of a stick. Someone else had a flat flax basket and jostling this up and down spraying the road with stones. Don’t worry they had a roller! And this was not like a one
Washing the Carrotts
They are washing their produce under the Dam off, this I saw many times, its like this is the way it is done.
As we were coming into Saigon we noticed the concrete medium strips on the roads were painted white and red strips. We came across a group of people, one would outline the stripes and the others were filing them in. They were painting these medium strips by hand with paintbrushes we would use at home. Miles and miles and miles of medium strips.
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