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Published: January 19th 2008
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This is the life
Kicking back in the 'wet bar' Nha Trang is billed as Vietnam’s ‘party central’ so with that in mind, we thought it would be a suitable place for us to ring in the New Year. While we found some good times after dark, the days were rather disappointing due to the grey skies which lingered for the entire time we were there. Considering the city’s number one drawcard is its beach and we had about one hour of only partial sunshine in a week, there wasn’t a whole lot to smile about during the day.
We didn’t have anything longer than a two hour stint on the beach, and on that occasion disaster almost struck when Greg and I went in for a dip. We could see from the beach that the waves were quite powerful, and the fact that they had faces a good metre and a half in height and were breaking into water between knee and thigh deep should have alerted us to the potential hazard at hand. As there was no rip, it was safe enough provided you timed your entry so as not to coincide with a set of waves coming in and swam straight out to behind the break zone.
Happy new year!
HJT, Gem and Greg on NYE Optimistically, body surfing would have yielded little more than a dislocated shoulder, but realistically I think it would have to have been considered a clean escape if you didn’t break a bone.
Greg and I were sensible enough to give the body surfing a miss, but his timing was a little out on his way back in. After getting slammed by one wave and taking in a mouthful of water, he had only a couple of seconds upon surfacing before another wave came and nailed him again. In his words “it was the closest I have ever come to drowning,” and I’m told by Gem (who witnessed the whole incident from the beach) that he wasn’t exaggerating. While all this was occurring I was still out behind the break zone, blissfully unaware that my travel mate of the past month and a half had just had a near death experience. When I came back to shore ten minutes or so later Greg was still shaken up, so I decided that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to go in again in similar conditions. As it turned out, they didn’t abate for the rest of our stay so that
Bring on 2008!
Dan, Rachael and HJT at the Sailing Club was the last dip I had.
Despite the inactivity during the day, we were never short of activity at night. Nha Trang introduced me to the South East Asian phenomenon of the ‘bucket’, which as most would know is an umbrella term used to describe a very large, very strong drink which costs next to nothing. Along with Dan and Rachel, a couple of Poms that Greg and Gem had met on Ko Chang and turned up in Nha Trang, we became part of the furniture that week at the Zippo Bar.
While the friendly service and dirt cheap drinks partially explained our loyal patronage, I think it was even more so due to the fact that they had a pool table and a foosball table. As Greg and I have been engaging in some form or another of friendly competition since we met up again in mid November, Zippo proved a perfect place to satisfy our competitive urges. Mention must be made of Gem at this point. She joined in on the pool table and showed some formidable form, the best I’ve ever seen from a girl in fact. At the risk of isolating the feminist component
Watch out Take That
Vietnam's self-proclaimed 'premier boy band' of my readership, I would go so far as to say that Gem played pool like a man.
While Zippo showed us some great times, we wanted to make sure we were at the biggest and best party Nha Trang had to offer on New Year’s Eve. After starting with a couple of warm-up buckets at Zippo, we started combing the streets looking for the hotspot. All of us noted how quiet the place seemed for a New Year’s Eve, but once we arrived at the Sailing Club we realized why. 95% of the tourist population of Nha Trang aged between eighteen and thirty were there. It may have cost a few bob to get in and the drinks were five times the price of anywhere else, but it was well worth it. It was so good in fact that when Greg, Gem, Dan and Rachel left I decided to stay on for a couple of hours by myself. Though this could have been a perilous decision, I made it home before sunrise and in one piece - a marvelous start all round to 2008.
I had hoped that the break of the New Year might somehow magically
These guys rocked!
Check out the shades on the guitarist impact on the weather and bring some sunshine, but the grey skies persisted. The boat trip we did the next day, though good, would have been so much better if the sun was shining. The famous turquoise colour of the water wasn’t exactly at its most striking under heavy cloud. We did get a chuckle after our lunch on the boat though when the crew, which moonlights as the self-described ‘best boy band in Vietnam… “watch out for us on MTV”’ put on a performance.
While I have heard better music before, one couldn’t deny them their phenomenal rapport with their audience. The front man would go around asking each person where they were from, and then sing a song from that country. About 70% of those aboard were Aussies though, and as no-one needed to hear Waltzing Matilda twenty five times, he had to keep asking till he found a new one. When someone said they were Thai, he waved them off on the grounds that they were “same same” as Vietnamese. A bit of a stretch perhaps, much the same as when a girl told him she was German and he said “same same” as French, which
Disco inferno
HJT and Greg busting a move on the dancefloor had already come up. If only the French and the Germans had have realised this in successive World Wars - it would have spared them both a lot of bloodshed. My favourite reaction came when a girl said she was from Lithuania. Far from a song, the only response she got was a blank stare.
After a brief dip and indulgence in the ‘floating bar’ (which only served red wine that tasted like Throaties) we stopped off on an island for an hour. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do there, so Greg and I pulled out the frisbee for a workout. Battling the windy conditions on a very narrow beach was a challenge, but we were well practiced and drilled by that stage. That just made it all the more disappointing that Greg lost his head and tried to throw a Hail Mary which drifted over some huts and into the vicinity of some palm trees. We spent the next half an hour before departure searching high and low for the frisbee (which was not just any frisbee mind you, but an Aerobie Super Disc) to no avail.
When we got back to Nha
Happy hour in the 'wet bar'
Living the hard life in Nha Trang Trang I made some enquiries on the internet as to whether Aerobie had any distributors in Vietnam, only to discover that not only were there none in Vietnam, but none in Laos (our next country) either. The mood was therefore grim as we boarded the overnight bus to Hoi An that night.
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