Touring Vietnam - Nha Trang & Dalat

Hi everybody. I'm having a fantastic time in Vietnam and I feel I'm getting deeper into its culture after every city I visit. The sleeper bus to Nha Trang was the best sleeper bus I've been on by far! There was enough room to stretch legs and I even got some sleep!! We arrived in Nha Trang early and spent about half an hour going around looking for a cheap place to stay. We got a really nice place for $9 a room, following a motorbike ride around Nha Trang trying to find room. Since we actaully slept on this sleeper bus we headed straight off. Briony managed to get some sand in her eye the day before (recurring theme) so we went to get that removed first. Luckily the hospital was just around the corner and Briony was absolutely fine after. We got some breakfast and went 'round some tour operators to sort out our time in Nha Trang. We booked ourselves in on a boat tour around the surrounding islands for the next day.

Today though we decided to spend a bit of time on the beach. Andy managed to anger a 12 year old beach seller (by that I mean a girl who walks around with a basket of tat and sweets) who chased him around the beach for a while. Meanwhile we went for a swim in the sea. The beach is beautiful and sea cool, and we didn't get mauled by the crazy jellyfish stingy things. A few hours later we got ourselves dry and I walked about town. I went into a really odd art gallery that I can't even begin to describe. The people were very friendly though and some of it was really cool.A walk down the beach later took us to what we considered to be an "expensive bar". It cost 60,000VND for a ltr of beer. That's 2 pounds. Which, yes is very expensive for Vietnam. But it was own brewed, and it was really good. Also, the bar had a swimming pool, which was ace. We went back, got dinner, had an early night.

Boat day! Early pick up at the hotel and a minibus ride to the dock. We boarded the boat with some other Western and Asian tourists to find our guide was completely mental. His introductions made him sound insane but he was a lot of fun. At the first stop we threw ourselves off the boat and got some snorkals. Snorkling was amazing! Me and Alice went out to the reef and saw loads of jellyfish, corals, and all sorts of colourful and strange fish. Back on the boat and our crazy guide and his merry companions got out some homemade drums, a guitar and some mic's. Listening to some pretty good Vietnamese versions of Western rock songs and all of us singing "We all live in a yellow submarine!" they invited everyone onto the stage to dance along. Alice and Briony duly obliged while I got a really good video of the two. We had some lunch, which was really good. Though some of the other Westerners didn't like it... more for us!! At the next stop was the... urm... free wine tasting. This involved our guide floating about in the water with a bar strapped to him pouring foul tasting wine into our cups. It was made even more foul tasting since we were just swimming about in the sea trying desperately (and in vain) to hold our drinks above the water. So basically everything tasted of sea water. Great fun! Next stop was our last before going back to the dock. Me and Andy got off the boat to visit the famed aquarium. It was surrounded by massive, gaudy looking stone statues of sharks and octupi, etc, etc. It also had a really odd layoutmaking it impossible to know where you were supposed to be going. It was really cool though. We saw sharks and giant turtles (not in the same tank), and loads of really cool fish. Some I recognised from Dad's fish tank and others I saw when I was snorkling.

Next morning we left for Dalat. My seat wasn't really attached to the bus, but it wasn't too much of a bother until we started coming into Dalat. It's sort of up a mountainso there are a lot of winding roads. We had a reception I wasn't expecting when we arrived in Dalat. We are used to arriving somewhere and being mobbed by hundreds of people trying to usher us into their hotels. Not Dalat. No one wanted us at all. They all make a hand signal we worked out later to mean simply "No!" So we walked around the town a bit until we eventually found someone to put us up - about 2 dozen guest houses and hotels later. So we got a room and it only costs us $3 a night each so that's pretty good. Dalat itself is really nice and so we're out on a mission to change the locals views on Westerners. Some people love us, but some just completely refuse to give any assistance whatsoever.

So day one Dalat and we did absolutely nothing! It was a relatively long bus ride and after the ordeal of finding a place to stay we just chilled out in our room, which, by the way, is in a basement. So we stayed in and watched Jurassic Park. Day two Dalat was a lot more exciting. We got up and after breakfast me and Andy rented motorbikes and Alice and Briony got on the back of bike taxi's and we drove off to a waterfall outside of town. Me and Andy immediately lost each other. It isn't particularly easy to learn how to use gears in Dalat. It's extremely hilly, full of one way streets, and there are other bikes everywhere!! We found each other at the petrol station and headed out to the waterfall... again. The waterfall itself was a massive dissapointment. You can't swim in it and it wasn't particularly exciting to see. There was, however, a rollercoaster... Although that was pretty rubbish too! Our excitment was driving around windy countryside roads on motorbikes. It was fantastic fun and when we got back to Dalat we took the girls for a spin around the big lake at the center of the city. We stopped and watched the kites. If anyone's read the book The Kite Runner, well it looked exactly how you imagine the hundreds of kites in that. We then drove to an attraction called 'Crazy House'. This 'Crazy House' is indeed crazy though I am yet to understand the point of it. It's a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland-esque, expensive guest house. Complete with a giant kangeroo next to your bed with redlight bulbs for eyes. It was extremely odd, didn't give us an inkling of Vietnamese culture or any knowledge about it's people... but it was kinda fun! We got back to the hotel in time to watch the third installment of Jurassic Park - haha, we're so sad!

Day three Dalat was even MORE exciting than day two! Me and Andy got up super early to fo 'Canyoning'. Canyoning is basically abseiling... down canyons. It wasn't a long day out but in 4 hours we abseiled down 4 different cliffs, all completely different. The first was a 20mtr sheer cliff face, which means lots of lumping. The second was another cliff edge that ended in the river. The third was actually IN a waterfall - not a little one either, this was huge! - where at the end, which was still 6-7 mtrs up, the rope runs out and you jump off into the pool below. The final abseil took us down a cliff to hit the top of a waterfall that drags you around into the pool. Again the rope runs out and you have to just drop. (Don't worry Parents, we had life jackets and helmets!) The bits between all these amazing abseils were just as fun. Trekking trough the jungle where you wade waist deep in rivers was just incredible! Also we got to waterfall which was really smooth rock allowing us to slide into the pool below. At first sight it looks really dangerous and stupid... which it probably was, but it was brilliant fun! The other thing we did in this trip was launch ourselves over a cliff and waterfall 20mtrs high into the pool below! I was absolutely cacking myself and still can't work out why I did it... twice!!

We got back to the hotel earlier than we thought and rented bikes to race off and try to find the girls. We somehow bumped into them (not literally) about 10km's outside of the city going to a different waterfall. We all went off to another waterfall another 20km's away. My motorbike today wasn't as good as yesterday. The speedo didn't work, not did the gear indicator... but I got by okay. It is brilliant fun driving around Dalat because of all the hills and twisty roads. This other waterfall was again pretty lame. Well actually, the waterfall itself was really cool. It's just surrounded by rubbish crap. For example there's a huge stone elephant about 15' high supplying a rickety bridge to the otherside. You can also sit on an Elephant, though you can't go anywhere, and an Ostrich, which will take you around in a small circle. So we drove back to the hotel and now I am here writing this excessively long post!

Just a few thoughts I want to get down about Vietnam. It is a beautiful country and the people here are so nice. Everything is new and up-to-date, since everything else was blown apart by bombs and little of what remains of old Vietnam exists along the coast. What ruins Vietnam for me are the foreigners. It's no surprise no one in Dalat wants to give us a room. It's much more untouched and much less touristy than most of the other places we've been and it's perfectly understandable why they would want to keep it that way. I barely spotted a single person from England in China, but SE Asia is absolutely full of them. But they aren't travellers or backpackers. They are gap year louts who want an extended holiday. They don't care about the culture or what it is they are ruining. They just want to get drunk and do the Oz/SE Asia "route". As you can probably tell it does frustrate me, so I'll keep enjoying Vietnam and SE Asia in my own way and to anyone who wants to visit in the future, just think about what it is you want out of travelling... if you don't care about a country's culture or history then piss off back to Malaga!! End rant.

Another thing: Andy has put some photo's of Vietnam up on his Flikr account. You can get to this by clicking on the link top left of this page where it says "Picture and Videos from Andy". Hope everyone is doing okay and enjoying their summer! I can't begin to tell you how much I am enjoying mine!!

PS. Paul, I think my suit + 2 shirts was around $45. I spent a lot more than that though since I bought so much other stuff! I probably wouldn't have but loads of people gave me birthday money and I thought, what better thing to spend it on!? How long till you leave? Oh and could you give me you're e-mail address?