While we were there, the city was organizing and getting ready for their Sea Festival that was to begin on the day that we were going to leave.
Brian and I spent a day and a half on the relaxing on the beach. The beaches are nice, but I didn't think that they were even close to the beauty of Phu Quoc. There were loads tourists - Vietnamese and foreign, lazing about on lounge chairs.
Besides beaching it, we wandered around the town. At first we walked around the area that was pretty much designated for foreign tourists. There was one or two long streets that foreigners could stick to and get everything they needed without actually having to interact with local people whatsoever. Here, they could book their snorkeling and diving tours, eat a burger with fries, and purchase billabong fashion. Only one street over one could find a variety of other Vietnamese food stalls where a person could find a meal for a quarter of a price of that on the "foreign-designated" side, and the locals. We stuck to this side mostly to find interesting and cheap things to eat.
We found this rice cart filled with sticky rice of different colors and mixtures. I have never seen this sort of thing in Hanoi, so we asked for a small container to try a little bit of each of them. So delicious and sweet!
On one of the mornings we ate breakfast a pho shop around the corner from our hotel. I have never eaten Southern style pho before, and that is all that is served in the States, so Brian had to explain to me how the sauces work and why our waitress gave us a little bowl along with the pho.
The coolest thing we did in Nha Trang was to go to the Thap Ba thermal mud spas a little outside of the city. The mud is taken from a nearby mountain and the warm water comes from a local hot spring. For just 100vnd a person (roughly $6.00) we were able to spend 2 hours at the spa going through the process:
First we took showers to make sure we were clean enough to go into the baths, then we went in a bath for 15 minutes with the mud from the mountain (we were in a bath with about six other people). It was funny because they gave us buckets to pour the mud all over ourselves and it felt like we were on some Nickelodeon show from the eighties or early nineties pouring slime on eachother.
Next we showered again to wash the mud off. Lastly we went into their thermal pool to swim and relax.
That was definitely the best part of our trip to Nha Trang - for me at least. I think Brian would say that the best part of the trip for him was the cheap, and delicious seafood dinners and the four button down collared shirts he had custom made.
Next stop: Ho Chi Minh City
2 comments:
I first rode a motorbike in Nha Trang. I ran out of gas within a 5 minutes of getting on the bike.
That sounds like something you would do.
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