Fun in the Nha Trang Sun

Our trip up to Nha Trang was fairly uneventful although I did have Valium induced nightmares. I had never taken it before, and after the OxyCotin incident of 2005, don't worry it was prescribed not abused but nevertheless, I know I have a sensitive reaction to percription drugs so I only took half the Valium. Even still I had two horrible dreams. In the first one I was on the elevator in my building but I couldn't move my arms, because of the Valium, so I couldn't push the button for my floor and had to stand there helplessly riding up and down. People would get on and off the elevator giving me stange looks. While I stood completely immobile and sort of out of it. When ever someone wasn't looking or if I was alone on the elevator I would try desperately to swing my limp arms up to push the button for my floor. But I could never get to it. At one point I was sort of leaning against the buttons groaning softly and possibly drooling. Awful! In the other dream I was lying in my pod on the bus, ( our bus had sleeper compartments which were sort of podlike,) but it was as if I was in an open eyed coma. Everyone around me was talking about me like an invalid. in this one I think I definitely was drooling and generally looked like a vegetable. I could hear everyone talking about me and looking concerned but I couldn't move or respond. It was very, "blink once if you can hear me." Anyway I did manage to get some sleep eventually, once the Valium wore off I think, and we pulled in to beautiful Nha Trang early the following morning. On our way into town I woke up in time to see one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen.

The bus dropped us off near the centre of the main town so Justin and I set off to find accomodation and get a coffee. We've learned over the last few months that nothing says fresh meat to the touts more than wandering around town in the early morning with your backpacks. Doing so leaves you open to endless hassle and constant shouts of, "you look, my hotel. Cheap price." etc etc. So I left my bag with Justin at one of the hotels and went off to investigate rooms for us on my own. We ended up staying at a reasonable enough place called Oasis Guesthouse, where we had two huge beds, and a TV, plus two beautiful windows overlooking the sea. The sea views pretty much sold us and at $12 a night it was justifiable, although probably more than we would have liked to spend. I know I know, we have gotten so cheap! The biggest pain in the ass about the hotel, and indeed about Nha Trang, is that water shortages in the country have really effected the hydro-electric power supply and so Nha Trang is forced to go without power every other day for about 12 hours. It turned out to be a major pain in the ass.

After we learned about the alternating day power outages we decided to organise our stay in Nha Trang so that we were out as much as possible during the days without power. Of course, given our luck we arrived just as the power was cut, which meant we would have to spend our first day in Nha Trang going without. God life as a traveler is stressful. We were both pretty worn out from the unrestful bus ride and would have loved to have spent the day sitting around in the air conditioning watching telly but decided instead to take a nap and then go exploring. Rough eh? We also decided that we would need to come up with a daily plan to avoid the boredom and overheating that no power can contribute to.

I was looking forward to doing some more scuba diving and Justin wanted to snorkel so we planned that for the next power outage day. We spent some of our first day in town scouting out dive and snorkel options. And then wandered around the main area of Nha Trang for a while and went to the beach. Off in the distance we could see the cable car which ferries mainlanders over to a small island called VinPearl, home to Nha Trang's very own water and amusement park. It didn't look too far away so in the afternoon Justin and I decided to walk over to it and get some more info about VinPearl Land. We knew we'd have the next day to hang out in town and go to the beach, watch movies etc in full air conditioned glory. So we thought we might want to spend our last day in town sans power over at the water park. It turned out to be a bit further than we thought but since Justin and I have both gotten unacceptably fat* in the last month or so we figured the excersise would do us good.

We were able to organise our diving/snorkling through Rainbow Divers, the oldest dive shop in Vietnam, so that Justin and I could go out on the same boat and dive the same sights. I ended up doing a Nat Geo specialist program, which was really just glorified fun dives. But fun they were indeed. I wouldn't say that the diving in Nha Trang is amazing. It certainly wasn't as good as Koh Tao. But it was quieter and there was some interesting wildlife and coral. Justin and I both found it a scenic trip, especially any view which included our eye candy for the day. I never did get his name but he was a super cute instructor, and he had a very sexy/cliche tattoo of a hammerhead shark on his right shoulder. Justin and I fought over who got to be in a fantasy relationship with him. Justin even took shameless pictures of him under the disguise of getting some great landscape shots. Quetaine! I am pretty sure he was on my team so I claim victory on that one. Of course he was busy instructing some blonde Swedish chick who was doing her open water certification but that is beside the point. I am sure he was madly in love with me regardless.

While in town we also took the oppurtunity to do a small bit of pampering. Nha Trang is famous for its mud bath spa so Justin and I went for the day to see what it was all about. It was pretty funny actually. I was surprised how many of the visitors were Vietnamese and not foreign tourists. And that definitely added some culture** to the experience. First you get a semi private mud bath outside. They have dozens of them all in varying sizes. That way you and your group can take part in the bathing togehter. There were entire families, complete with infants, aunts, uncles, grandparents etc all mud bathing together. Sometimes as many as 12 to 15 bathers all in one tub. They kept putting Justin and me into heart-shaped tubs together, which we of course found hilarious. After the mud bath you are meant to sit out in the sun for fifteen minutes to let the mud harden. I noticed that many of the Vietnamese seemed to skip this seemingly important step, but I figured it was because in general the Asians don't like too much sun exposure. Unlike us whities they loath getting tan. Imagine that! After the mud hardens you take a thorough shower and then run through a sort of high powered hose obstacle course for a final cleaning. The final step involves sitting in another tub, heart-shaped for us of course, with natural hot spring mineral water. The only problem with that was it was about 35 degrees already and so the last thing we wanted to do was sit for twenty minutes in a hot tub. But we figured our skin is worth it. And besides no good beauty regime is pain free right? So we suffered throught the near heat stroke and left feeling gloriously rejuvenated.

On our final day in Nha Trang we decided we had to make the trip over to Vin Pearl to check out the amusement park. The ride over was awesome, except for the older gentleman with the facial whiskers that were almost as long as Justy's ponytail. It was difficult not to stare. The amusement park itself was sort of underwhelming. It was no Wonderland that is for sure. But the water park was a total blast. We had a grand old time pretending we were 14 again. And since it was a weekday we almost never had to wait in any lines. We did have one sort of scary moment near the end of the day when we were waiting in line for one last amusment park ride. We were next on when the ride stopped and a woman appeared to be completely passed out. I am not sure if she fainted or what but it took two men to carry her off the ride and they appeared to be unable to get her to come around. Justin and I didn't wait around to see what was going to happen next since the crowd was growing and the situation appeared to be spiraling in a dark direction. We hightailed it out of there and got on virtually the next cable car back to Nha Trang. It was getting fairly late by then so we had a quick dinner and made our way back to the hotel where we were getting the bus up to Hoi An.

*Justin and I have thankfully rebounded from being fat and are making our way back onto team thin

**see previous post regarding the definition of cultural activities