Nha Trang - First Day

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After 5 and a half days in Hoi An we were very happy to leave, given the states of our wallets...e.g. we don't have any wallets anymore because we had to trade them for food after buying so many clothes...ugh!

To fly to Nha Trang from Hoi An we had to get a taxi half an hour to Danang airport. Danang airport seems to be an ex-US Air Force base, and possibly now a Vietnamese Air Force base as well, as across from the terminal they still have the original concrete hangars from the war.

So after a flight in a midget plane from the worlds smallest airport (Danang) to the worlds even smaller'est airport (Cam Ranh) we were in Nha Trang. Our first impressions of Nha Trang are that its pretty similar to the Gold Coast - long stretch of nice looking beach, with a rapidly growing line of sky rise hotels along it.

The first night in Nha Trang we met up with Anita, Natasya and Jenny again, as well as Christie and sister? We went out to a very nice looking sea food restaurant that has a huge amount of fresh sea food that you pick from, which is then cooked for you - and is a tonne cheaper than you'd find in oz - 7 of us ate dinner for about $45aus including drinks. After dinner we went to one of the bars, in Nha Trang people approach you on the street with flyer's for different bars with different deals, at night you cant walk very far without someone trying to pounce on you with a free cocktail or all night happy hour. The bar we went to was pretty nice and they had 20,000dong or $1.60aus 'buckets'. Buckets are like a big honey/jam jar full of alcohol and soft drink. They re pretty nice but you can definitely tell why they only cost 20,000 - local alcohol is baaaaaad. Anita and Jenny both visited vomit land after only a small amount of drinks, and some people were feeling very seedy the following morning.

Today was our first full day here, so we went on a day long boat tour of four islands in the area. We started out near our hotel after breakfast and headed for the port where we boarded one of the many tourist boats. The boat took us to our first island (which wasn't that great) but we hopped into the water and went snorkeling. The snorkeling was good and the water was warmer than Melbourne, but the corals weren't much compared to what you would find in Aus, but there were plenty of fish around. After our snorkel the boat continued to the next island where we stopped for lunch on the boat. Lunch was pretty good (altho it was cold - spring rolls cold?) and there was heaps of food. Again we didn't step foot on this island and continued onto the next. While on our way to the next island our tour guide and the crew decided to put on a show for us, they got out an electric guitar, a drum kit consisting of some drums and some BUCKETs and some fantastic voices...? This was probably the most random thing ever and they enthusiastically pumped out both Vietnamese songs and western ones like Hotel California...which admittedly was possibly not the best rendition.

The third island should be renamed tourist island. It simply consisted of a beach that had been covered in anything that could exploit tourist dollars. You had to pay to go onto the beach, to sit on a chair, breath etc etc. The place was pretty nice but I'm sure you could have just sailed the boat around the corner and the beach would have been free and deserted. There were a lot of water sports happening in the water around the island, like para sailing and jetskies, but it didn't seem like the greatest idea to hire out jetski's to idiot tourists around people swimming and I saw 3 people manage to capsize their jetski on the move. After a while on the beach we went to the last island, which was an aquarium. It was a pretty cool building, it was supposed to be a big ship, but we couldn't understand why they had spent so much money on the building, and then had cheapass tanks. The tanks just had fish in them...no plants or coral, or even some sand on the bottom of the tank. They just had crappy stickers of plants on the back of the tank - el dodgo!
Finally after the aquarium we made our way back to Nha Trang.

We have decided to get our Open Water Diving Licences here in Nha Trang because its really cheap. Its going to take us 4 days to get them, which takes up most of the time we've got here in Nha Trang, but should be really fun. We have to spend the first 2 days having lessons in a classroom as well as diving in a Navy pool. After we've got that stuff down pat we spend the last 2 days out putting it all into practise in the bay. Its costing us about $255 US each, which is a lot cheaper that aus, and we get an internationally recognised certificate/licence. It wasn't the cheapest place around, you could do it for $160US!, but it was run by French and Americans and seemed to be laid back and professional at the same time.

Our dive course starts tomorrow at 8am so we're having and early night (filled with lots of fun text-book reading so we can pass our dive exams!!)

S and B

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