Beach again
Trip Start
May 08, 2008
1
11
25
Trip End
Ongoing
Nha Trang,
Vietnam
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Nha Trang is a very good town to spend a few days in. The beach has some litter from the locals and there are lots of vendors on the beach trying to sell you something but that's all fine. In fact you can have a good chat with them at times. The beach is enormous, something like 6km long with lots and lots of sand. We spent our few days going there around 11, staying until 5ish then going for dinner and a drink or two. I spent a fair amount of the time in the shade but Maria certainly enjoyed the sunshine. The vendors became entertaining after a couple of dayas as they recognised the faces.
On one of the mornings we went diving across the bay where there are some interesting corals and fish. Unfortunately having learned to dive in the Bay Islands last year on a spectacular reef (second only to the Great Barrier Reef) I think we were seriously spoiled and really need to learn to appreciate ordinary coral beds. The diving was good anyway with a couple of swim throughs and good variety of levels on the first dive. We also surfaced through a swarm of jellyfish, harmless ones thankfully, but it was a weird sensation. The second dive was at much shallower depths which kind of made us feel like we could have just snorkelled and seen as much, at least for some of it but up there the light was much better so it was still good enough with lots of Finding Nemo type fish swimming around. The big thing with diving here was the presence of lionfish and scorpionfish which are apparently very very poisonous, but are only dangerous if you sit or stand on them. We saw some but thankfully all on our own terms as they lurked under rocks.
There was also a good shop in the town which put movies and music onto ipods for a very reasonable amount so we loaded up a dozen or so of each in preparation for some of our longer journeys coming up, they came in handy straight away on our bus to Hoi An, our next destination.
I can't think of too much else about Nha Trang, we really enjoyed it, as a beach town only, we saw none of the sights in the surrounding areas. One peculiarity of this part of the world is the native aversion to the sun. While all of us westerners are mad keen to get darker, the asians are all trying to get paler. Even all the face creams and sun screens are "whitening". This means that during the heat of the day they cover up incredibly well, with some of hte female vendors wearing several layers (in about 30 degrees), gloves, hats and even umbrellas. Once the worst heat has gone, around 4.30 ish they all come out and suddenly in the space of 20 minutes the beach goes from having 100 foreigners only to being covered in thousands of Vietnamese. Its great to see and lots of cooking stations are set up to grill tasty seafood, so fresh that the crabs keep trying to climb out of the basins! Good times.
