The dunes of Mui Ne!!

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Our plan from leaving Saigon is to make our way northwards to Hanoi, stopping off at a number of places along the way - first stop Mui Ne! Mui Ne is a small coastal beach town, which was only a 5 hour ride up from Saigon. We arrived with 3 other backpackers (2 English guys and a Danish girl) and none of us had anywhere to stay booked. The five of us jumped on to the back of some moto-taxis making our way up the main strip of the town and eventually found a guesthouse that had room for us all at the inn! The town is mostly just a long strip along the coast that’s lined with restaurants, guesthouses and bars but is still quiet enough not to be just another tourist beach resort.

As soon as we stepped off the bus we were dished out a bunch of flyers to celebrate Russian New Year (13th Jan) at a beach bar called Pogo – it happened to be 2 doors down from our guesthouse so we thought why not! We headed out with our new pals Ben, Alistair and Laura and a lot of Russian vodka was consumed to bring in the New Year! We only have vague memories of the night but we know that it was a cracking night and that the Russians know how to party! We had planned to only spend 2 days in Mui Ne but our hangovers took care of day 2 so we extended our stay to 3 days!!

On our last day we hired a moped as we had discovered Mui Ne was the only place in Vietnam that had sand dunes. Amazing! There are two separate locations outside the town – one with red sand dunes and further out and more impressive the vast white sand dunes. It was like a little piece of Africa dropped into Vietnam! The drive to the dunes was through fantastic scenery, as the green fields slowly changed to sandy plains, with the coast always in view. When you arrive at the sand dunes you are over-run by kids selling you board sledges for hire to sledge down the dunes. Like mugs we hired a couple for 60,000 dong and hiked up to the top of the dunes, wiped off our sweat and then prepared ourselves for the adrenalin rush to come. However when we attempted to sledge down the dunes we basically just moved slowly for a short distance then just sank into the sand!! (ack well at least we tried eh and the local kids got some pocket money!). Unfortunately our camera broke en route to the white sand dunes so we only have pictures of the red dunes to share. Were both really gutted about this cause the white sand dunes are way more breathtaking!

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