Blogs from Vung Tau, Ba Ria - Vung Tau, Southeast, Vietnam, Asia

I feel like I phoned it in a bit with my last post so I will try to make this one a good one. I woke up early and very well rested to completely crashing out the day before and sleeping for like 12 hours. I booked a ticket on a Hydrofoil out to the beach to of Vung Tau. 250.000 Dong and hour and half seemed like a small investment to escape the unmitigated chaos that is Ho Chi Minh. The boat left around 10 and boy, does that thing haul-ass. I was caught of guard by a few things on the trip; the Viet man sprawled out snoring to beat the band, 5 giant shirtless Czech men that all the locals seemed pretty wary of but the weirdest was the fact that on the ... read more

Ellen, Alex and I made our way back to Saigon especially because we have been invited to be guests of Loc to celebrate a milestone associated with the passing of Loc’s father the previous year. Normally the milestone is the first anniversary of the death and signifies the formal end of the mourning period. However in a perfect show of just how flexible Buddhism is, the family elects to slate the anniversary at 100 days because anything else would come up too close to the Viet New Year celebration of Tet. The celebration is to take place in the family’s home town of Vung Tau, a favourite weekend getaway for Saigonese looking for some beach time. As proceedings are getting underway at 9am, we arrange to meet Loc and his fiancé Truc at 6.30am sharp at ... read more

It was another really hot day on Monday 5th March and so we planned to get the Hovercraft Ferry or Hydrofoil down to Vung Tau, which is about 50 miles away on the River/Sea route. Vung Tau is a coastal town that is being touted as the next big place in Vietnam. The reason for that is that it's location is better than Saigon as a Port and it is of course a Sea Side town, it also has one other important commodity ..... Oil..... and you can see the oil rigs quite clearly from the shore. The Aussies come over to work them, and those that don't go home on their time off, stay in the town. The place also the a pretty lousy reputation because this is the town that Gary Glitter was allowed ... read more

Vung Tau After a few days in Saigon it's good to escape to somewhere a little less frenetic. The two ferry companies operating to Vung Tau come to the rescue. Vung Tau is 125km from Saigon sitting on the South China Sea and although it's not an island, it has isolated island feel to it. The main town has a laid-back charm to it and has many attractive French colonial buildings. The market has a fish section which is one of the most impressive Monk has seen in Vietnam, probably as a result of the hundreds of small fishing boats moored offshore. There are beaches, including in the town, however, the main beach called the 'back beach' is on the other side of the peninsular - just a 5-minute taxi ride from town. It's a fairly ... read more

Once we arrived in Vung Tau we realised that on the weekends this place is pretty full and it would have helped us if we had booked accomodation ahead of schedule but that would have been too easy. We went to a bar called Belly's as this was reccomended to us by some friends. Belly is an Aussie and a lot of the patrons are oil rig workers from Oz working in Vietnam and also some old geezers who 'find' it easier for certain ladies to like them! Unfortunately Belly was away on a motor cycle holiday but his number one bar girl called Luen was still able to help us find great accomodation.We stayed at a place called Anh Binh 2 which had two bedrooms and was self catered. Its a bit more expensive than ... read more