Advertisement
Published: March 2nd 2007
Leaving Hoi An we had another 12 hours bus journey through the night to get to our next destination which happened to be the main beach resort area of Vietnam called Nha Trang. The bus was really uncomfortable as the girl in front of me had her seat right make against my knees so I only managed 1.5 hours sleep through out the night, so as you can imagine I wasn’t the most enthusiastic to walk around the town for two hours with my backpack on trying to find a hotel. It took this long because that either the hotel was full or trying to rip us of because it was technically still Tet. Finally we found a place which turned out to be well worth the wait a very nice place with great staff.
I spent most of my time that afternoon on the beach sunbathing, swimming and playing more volleyball- such a hard life!! It’s funny because if I had seen Nha Trang beach a year ago I would have thought it was amazing but because I have spent so much time seeing beaches in Thailand and Malaysia I have got spoilt and so therefore Nha Trang was
ok but definitely not as good as others I have seen since traveling.
The day after I arrived all three of us booked ourselves on to a snorkeling trip to an island just off the coast but once I got on board the boat I realized most of the people were there to do scuba diving so I quickly changed to doing that instead and what a decision that turned out to be! I was expecting it to be a good dive site but wasn’t prepared to have the best 2 dives ever, the visibility was great and the variety of fish and coral was incredible. Though I still the most magical thing was seeing all the sunray’s passing thorough the surface of the water and casting the most wonderful colors and shadows on all the corals made for a real jaw dropping sight. If I could have shouted out in joy I would have, but it is a bit hard with a regulator in your mouth! The color and marine life have to be seen to be believed it really was an amazing dive site; I even managed to see 3 huge eels one of which was 1.5
meters long and get bitten by a small black and yellow fish but that was my fault for teasing it!
So after I came out the water and wouldn’t stop going on about how good the diving was here, Juan and Mark soon decided that they would do there Padi course here instead of Thailand. So for the next three days while they were doing there scuba diving course I made use of the time to relax, chill out, sunbath and of course eat loads of cheap food at every opportunity.
On the last day of Mark and Juan Padi course I headed of to Mui Ne in the morning while they finished there last two dives that afternoon. Mui Ne is an amazing place with its own little Microclimate it is particularly famous for it huge sand dunes, it really feels like you have just been transported to the middle of the desert (look at the pictures), the whole area is so different from any other place I have seen in Vietnam.
On the bus to Mui Ne I got chatting to another Brit called Neil who was a great laugh and we didn’t stop chatting the whole
way to Mui Ne, which made the bus journey go really quick this time. Once we arrived Neil and I decided to go for a walk into town for some food and money, now we knew Mui Ne was small but we didn’t realize that it was just long road stretching the length of the beach with just resorts and travel agents the whole way along it, so after walking about 6 or 7 kms we finally thought we should ask where the heck is the main town, it turned out to be a further 10km’s away so with a unanimous decision we decided to scrap that plan ago to the beach instead!
The beach is a very nice but is pretty windy which leads us to the 2nd thing Mui Ne is most famous for and that is the kite surfing. Kite surfing is a great sport where your waist is strapped to huge kite and your feet are attached to a surf board and basically as you can imagine the kite drags you along long. This looked great fun but after we inquired to see how much it cost and decided that 100 pounds for 5 hour tuition
How many kites!
Kite surfers paradisewas way too expensive no matter how fun it looked, I would rather save the money and do 10 more dives! At one time on the beach we managed to count just over 50 people kite surfing at one time up and down the beach. Some were so good they got some real speed which allowed them to jump of the crest of the waves 10feet into the air!
By the next morning Mark and Juan had arrived at Mui Ne, so all four on us rented motorbikes for the day and drove off to witness the sand dunes. We saw two different sand dunes the red and white, the white one where a lot further away but a lot bigger than the red ones. Both where incredible to see I have never seen so much sand in my life before. We took loads of pictures and spent our time running and jumped down the sides of the dunes as we hadn’t bought the sand boards unfortunately. The sand boards allow you to lie face first and slide down the dunes, but after a couple of times jumping down them all the sand sticks to your skin and due
I know my boat is around here somewhere!
Locally fishing village with all there boats at harbour to the amount you are sweating there, it makes you look and feel like a 6 foot walking sanding block!
The sand is so hot in places it really makes it hard to climb back up the side of the dune as you’re burning your hands and feet. We sat at the white sand dunes for quite a while just taking in the scenery as none of us had ever quite seen anything like this before.
We made our way back covered from head to toe in sand and so headed straight to the beach for a swim and a cool down. In the evening we took our bikes to the local town and drove around trying to find a good place for a drink, we did finally a good looking place that was well away from all the other tourists. We parked up our bikes and walked in the place which was packed and nearly everyone just seemed to stop and stare at us like they had never seen westerners before, it was quite a feeling having 40-50 people stop talking and turn around and stare at you Well this was what we were looking for so we
The white sandunes from the other side of the lake
I cant get over the differences of scenery and landscape within Vietnam ordered some drinks, none of us had any idea what we ordered as it was all in Vietnamese and no-one spoke English. So as we quietly had our drinks all of us kept noticing people pointing and staring at us, it was really funny, especially with the old 90’s dance music I haven’t heard since I was a kid playing in the back ground. I don’t think many travelers/tourists come here at all but it was definitely an experience.
The following morning I decided to take my bike to the red canyon quickly before I had to hand it back, the other three were all to lazy to get up and weren’t interested in seems some red rock as one of them put it! So I shot of 10kms down the road with the wind in my hair until I go the red rock cliff face. I parked up and took a small walk up to the top of this red cliff were it the opened out to reveal this lovely canyon, thou it isn’t as big as the picture might make you think. As you can see from the pictures the rocks are an amazing deep red/orange color
The boys and there toys
As much as i hate mopeds back home, they are great fun over here and looked even better when looking back through the canyons to relieve the blue sea in the background.
I then headed to what is called the fairy springs which is basically just a small sandy stream running from the mountains to the sea. It is a beautiful walk up the stream to see other kind of scenery and rock formations. I only had a little walk up here for about 15 mins because I had to head back and get by bags sorted out to catch my bus to Saigon (also known as Ho Chi Minh City) at 12.30. Even though I shouldn’t have rushed as I hadn’t taken into account that it was working on Vietnamese time so that meant it actually picked us up a just gone 14.00!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.043s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 9; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0207s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Eva and Simon
Eva Crabbe
Lush Photos!
What a lush set of photos mate - looks sooo amazing! Fair play to the yellow and black fish for biting you after you'd poked it : )