Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside!
Trip Start
Feb 28, 2008
1
7
18
Trip End
Jul 06, 2008
Nha Trang,
Vietnam
Thursday, March 27, 2008
I have a lot to talk about: a few more eventful bus rides, excessive alcohol consumption, my new found love for coffee, being awake for 3 days in a row, etc; so hang on to your seats!!!
Tuesday 25th March
The coach pulled into Nha Trang at 6.30 and it was raining lightly! Nice weather for my first day at a Vietnamese beach! The driver was about to pull away before he had taken my bag out of the hold so I had to jump back on to tell him! I then bumped into Kirsty and Simon who I had met briefly in HCMC as they had met Kristen in Siem Reap, Cambodia
Beach
. It turns out that they both went to Plymouth Uni. Simon lives in Torpoint, Cornwall, which was just over the river from where I stayed in Halls. I used to go the the same chip shop as him all the time. And I lived on the same road as Kirsty twice! Allbeit at different times. Small world! We decided to walk south down the beach to the budget guesthouses. As it was still only 7.20am I decided to have an hour long nap and then went to sit on the beach to write the four days worth of diary that I hadn't done in HCMC due to my busy partying schedule! I stayed there for about 4 hours and must have bought something from almost every beach seller around! I got a cold beer from one woman and then she just kept coming back! She would say "one beer no good. two beers very good", and so on! In the afternoon I stood and watched a girls beach volleyball competion - which is always good! On the way back to the guesthouse to change into my swimshorts I got stopped by two Vietnamese guys who ran a motorcycle tour group called Easy Riders. As soon as I told them I was from England they gave the usual Asian response off "Ahh, lovely jubbly" (from Only Fools and Horses". When I asked the leader what his name was he told me everyone called him Del-Boy. I then turned to his buddy and said "and you must be Rodney", to which he replied: "Yes, and you're a plonker". Genius!!! The tour looked amazing but I checked my schedule when I got back to the guesthouse and realised that I did not have the time to do their 5 day trip to Hoi An
More beach
. In that time I needed to be finished in Hoi An and in a place called Hue. After a long swin in the sea I headed out for some food and beer before having an earlyish night.Wednesday 26th March
Today I got up early and headed out for a full English breakfast before going to the beach. It was a lot hotter than the day before. The beer lady from yesterday kept coming over to me and I managed to haggle her down a couple of thousand dong due to my custom yesterday! At about 1pm I saw Po, a crazy, womanising 40 year old Vietnamese guy I kept bumping into yesterday. I ended up going for a beer with him. He took me to a little street bar where we got 2 litres of beer in a plastic bottle for 16,000 dong - 50p! After we had finished that (and Po had eyed up every girl walking past) Po was pretty smashed so I decided to go back to the guesthouse. I changed out of my swim shorts and went for a walk along the entire length of the Municipal Beach. I stopped for a rest about halfway and a Vietnamese lady came over trying to sell me some food. I said I didn't want anything but she came and sat down next to me and chatted anyway. She didn't know a lot of English, but we managed to chat for about half an hour by using hand gestures and writing in the sand to help explain bits that she didn't understand. That was really cool. Back at the guesthouse I bumped into Simon and arranged to meet him and Kirsty later
Even more beach
. I had a flyer for a place called the Zippo Bar that had a happy 'hour' from 9pm-midnight so we went there. We stayed for 2 hours and no one else came in! We decided to go somewhere a bit more lively and ended up at the Sailing Club. We sat outside chatting and watching this really drunk girl give it some on the dance floor, occasionally using one of the roof support poles to spin around! The place closed at 2am, but we managed to get a round in just before. At 2.30 they started to show the warm-up for the England - France footy game so we managed to persuade the manager to serve us a beer each so we could watch it. We didn't end up watching much of it anyway! At 4am the cleaners chucked us out so we went and sat on the beach as the bar staff had built a fire earlier. Me and Kirsty had said earlier that we were going to get up early to watch the sunrise, as Nha Trang is on the East coast of Vietnam, so we decided we might as well stay up. We found a little streetside stall to serve us some beers. A little later we decided to go for a swim whilst Simon stayed to guard our stuff. It was so cloudy that we couldn't even tell that the sun had risen until it had passed the clouds!Thursday 27th March
At 7am Simon went to bed. Me and Kirsty went for showers before going to have breakfast. We went to a tea room that served nice coffee and the smallest croissants in the world
And another one...
! After that we went to the beach and stayed there until just before 12. I got a little bit sunburnt again! Whoops! As we were getting the sleeper coach to Hoi An at 7.30 we decided that we would move all of their stuff into my room so that we could split the cost of my room for that day. Simon went back to bed, so me and Kirsty went out for some lunch. We bumped into a scarily happy Po on the way there who was off to see one of his lady friends! After some food, pool, and a rematch of our epic game of table football from the night before we headed back to the room to prepare for our 12 hour coach ride to Hoi An. It turns out that it was the most hellish I have ever experienced! Instead of the two-level single bed coach that I took from HCMC to Nha Trang, we were put on a bus that had double beds. I was next to a nice Irish dude, whose name I can't remember (suprise, suprise), but that wasn't the problem. I was next to the aisle in the row before the back which meant that the engine was right below me. That thing kicked out some serious heat, and my air-con wasn't working, so I spent the entire journey slowly cooking alive! After a couple of hours we hit a massive traffic jam caused by a truck that had overturned on the winding mountain road After the way that our driver had been driving previously - hammering it down a winding road on the edge of a mountain, overtaking on blind corners in the pitch black, etc - I wasn't entirely sure we would make it to Hoi An alive!T.B.C...
