Massage, Sauna, Mud Bat, Hot Springs... What more do you want?

On Valentines day I took a night bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang. Finally I would reach the good weather... Nha Trang is a medium-sized city with a large beach front, and is the location in Vietnam for beach holidays and water sports. The bus arrived at 6am. I found a nice hotel, 100 meter from the beach, but I couldn't enter the room until noon so I walked around the beach. Already at this early hour people wereexercising and playing sports at the beach front. When I left the beach to check out the tourist part of the city I encountered Jens and Anke again, the German couple I met before in Hue. We had breakfast together and they went back to their hotel. I took a motor bike taxi to the hot springs. After sitting all night in a night bus (I didn't have a sleeper this time) a massage and hot springs would do me good. The one hour massage was great, afterwards I entered the sauna and there I met several Americans. All us foreigners subsequently went to the mud bath, which was not that special so we left those after 10 minutes. One of the Americans is of Vietnamese descent and overheard several Vietnamese saying that we foreigners are so stupid to waste money by only staying so short in the mud baths... After all it costs around 1 euro ;-) Nothing for us but this shows again the difference in income. After the mud baths we went to the hot springs. The hot springs didn't have a very natural appearance, it looked more like a resort but it was very nice to lie on the chairs and occasionally take a dip in the swimming pool or stand under one of the man-made waterfalls.

Lazy day

After the night bus the previous night I decided to sleep in. Getting up around 11am, I walked a bit around town and sat down at a few cafes to send some e-mails and update my blog. One of the places I sat down was on the beach. Nice to do some work on a laptop while you hear the waves crashing :-) Later that afternoon I bought a bottle of Dalat white wine. My room had a fridge so I could sit on the balcony, sipping the pretty good Vietnamese wine and reading a book. In the evening I wanted to go out so I walked a bit around town until I met 3 other travelers on the street, they were on their way to a Bia Hoi place and that's were we stayed for most of the evening. We drank one of their more expensive beers, Tiger draft beer, which was sold in 1 liter cans for a little more than half a euro ;-) We ended the night in the Why Not bar around 2AM.

Party Boat

The next morning I had to get up early to go on a boat trip to 4 islands. The boat contained about 50 tourists, and the crew did their best to make a party. Highlights were a floating bar (hard to keep a glass stable when you're sitting in a tube in the ocean!) and the live performances, in which the crew used a makeshift drum and a real guitar to make music. From all the nationalities on board a few unlucky were 'forced' on the stage to sing a song from their country. It was amazing that the crew knew at least one song from each country. Being the only Dutchman on board I was not spared this fate... It took me a while to recognize the song after the band started playing and singing, but when I did I wholeheartedly sang the lyrics of 'Potje met Vet' together with my Vietnamese band-mates. I think we all knew only one line though…. Of the islands we visited, one had a decent coral reef we snorkeled at; another had a small resort in which you could rent canoes, jet-skis or para-sail. The most interesting island had an aquarium in which lots of tropical fish where swimming.

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