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Published: July 26th 2011
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Our first full day in Nha Trang! Or should I say our first full day near Nha Trang? We spent part of the day on Eco Green Island, a place that has been overtaken by a resort and tourists, and part of the day we spent in the city itself.
The day started out with a slight miscommunication – half of us thought breakfast was at 8AM, the other half thought that we were leaving at 8AM. Regardless, things worked out. Breakfast at the hotel is a lovely blend of many different foods – just about everything one might eat for breakfast in Vietnam (soups, noodles, fried rice, fruit), plus eggs to order, rolls, ca phe and juice in a buffet style, which is perfect when people have varying tastes. It also works well for me because I can avoid pork and eat a bunch of fruit – yum!
Nha Trang has a tram to one of the many islands just off the coast and that looked like a lot of fun, but we were headed to an island a bit farther away, less crowded, and so we took a 15 minute boatride and landed at the Eco Green
Island Resort. Part of the island resort is open to day tourists, like us, and the other is reserved for overnight guests. The scenery, of course, was beautiful. Micah kept walking around saying “I love this place! I love this place! I have to take pictures so that I can draw everything that we see and share it with Ben.” Needless to say, Micah is in the first stages of a Country Crush.
Now a Country Crush is something that happens to youngesters who are first exposed to a place outside the realm of their experience. It tends to lead to complete infatuation: everything in this country is the best, tastes the best, looks the best. And in the mind of the youngster, nothing will ever change… Like most crushes, however, it fades. The infatuation either leads to real love, knowing the country’s faults but embracing it and finding a balance, or it leads to disillusionment and rejection. Time will tell what will happen with Micah’s Country Crush.
The island resort had beautiful pools and it was a very hot day, and so after exploring a bit we ended up staying poolside for the remainder of our few
hours. Incredibly, even though we were only there for about three hours, we all ended up with varying degrees of sunburns. Whoops! But the pool was definitely worth it.
Lunch was back in Nha Trang proper, then we rested for a bit and got up at 5PM to go see a monument. On our way to Nha Trang we passed two anient Laotian monuments. The one within the heart of Nha Trang was similar, a temple of some sort, estimated well over a thousand years. I will have to search to find more information about it since I couldn’t read the signs in Vietnamese. The monuments themselves are pretty but the bricks are melting, which is a sad sight. Some of the restorations have attempted to make the monuments reflect their former glory, but it is clear that not all of the restorations were high-quality.
After the trip to the monument we went to dinner at a place that served Vietnamese food…and pizza and spaghetti. In fact, the Vietnamese couple at the table next to us shared a bowl of spaghetti and a pizza. I was curious to try that just to see what “pizza” would be like
here, but we had a different menu of Vietnamese food. Central Vietnamese food, which isn’t as flavorful. And since the restaurant was fancy, the portions were tiny – so we decided that at 9PM we’d go out again for bun thit nuong. In the meantime, we revisited our night market, got caught in the rain, and got ca phe sua da in the café around the corner.
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