Off East

We got another private car and driver to travel to Nha Trang. The stretch of coastline between Quy Nhon and Nha Trang is particularly beautiful with mountains, cliffs and lovely secluded bays. On this journey we had our first sign that dog is still eaten in Vietnam. We’d been told that the Vietnamese only really eat dog in the second half of the lunar month and hadn’t seen any sign of it so far. We stopped at a petrol station and a truck pulled in full of small cages each of which were packed with dogs. The driver got out of the truck to fill up and saw me staring. He looked over, smiled and then ran his finger across his throat and pointed at the dogs… We didn’t see anymore sign of dog being eaten however this day would henceforth be known as the ‘day of the dog’…

Nha Trang is quite a big town but generally as a tourist you only see a very small bit of it. As you drive in from the north you can see many small, ramshackle wooden houses for fishermen. Then you get to the seafront and it’s mostly western tourists everywhere. There’s about 5 blocks of the town that tourists frequent. We found our hotel then headed don to he beach to find some food.

The beach front is nice, some cool bars and restaurants all with loungers and watersports available. The sand is beautiful, the sea is clear and pretty clean. The beach gets a little dirty though in parts. We lay on the sand in the afternoon and this is where the ‘dog day’ hit us. Em looked over and found we’d been lying not 2 metres from a dead puppy that was washed up on the beach! I’ve no idea how it could have died but that was enough to make us move down the beach quite a way.

We had some great western food in Nha Trang. After pretty much nothing but Asian food for nearly 2 months it was actually really nice to have access to expat owned restaurants. Very near our hotel (which was lovely by the way) was a place owned by a guy from Mississippi. He prided himself on having the best smoked ribs in Asia and they were amazing! I have never had meat so tender, the hours of smoking really do the trick!

Across the bay from Nha Trang is Vinpearl Island resort. The island has a massive Hollywood style sign on it saying Vinpearl in huge letters. It’s basically a single resort hotel with a water park, theme park and aquarium. We decided to go for the water park as our hotel didn’t have a pool and at that time of year the sea on Nha Trang beach is very rough.

To get to Vinpearl you have two options; ferry or a cable car. We chose the cable car. It’s the longest over-water cable car in the world at 2.5km. Amazing views, but also extremely scary as Nha Trang is a windy place and the cable car rocks about all over the place. Not good 100m up over the sea! Em decided she wanted to get the ferry back after the outward journey, unfortunately the ferries weren’t running all day so she had to grin and bear the return cable car trip.

We enjoyed our 4 days in Nha Trang mainly as it was such a change from where we’d been before and our hotel was so nice. Nha Trang isn’t the sort of place I’d go back to for a holiday though! Much better and quieter beaches all along the Vietnamese coast although sadly I reckon a lot of these will get overdeveloped like Nha Trang pretty quickly.

Here’s a few photo’s from Nha Trang.