Mui Ne

They say Mui Ne ranks up there as the best beach in Vietnam so we were anxious to try it out.  We chickened out of trying to make a bus to Saigon and then a train to Mui Ne work - especially as the train only went about 15kms from there so we coughed up some of our budget and hired a driver to take us there in his SUV.  From the buses we passed, we probably would have done OK but none of us felt up to the hassle of trying to arrange all of that during a very hectic travel day after the last fiasco so we think we made the right decision.

The drive itself was pretty uneventful.  We even got to go through a bit of Saigon which reminded me of Seoul 25 years ago when I was there.  Unlike much of the delta, they seemed to have focused on cleaning it up and the roads were in good shape.

After about 6 hours, we drove into the little town outside Mui Ne where the train station was and tried to book our outgoing overnight tickets to Danang on the 19th.  Neither the lady at the (deserted) railway station, nor our driver spoke a word of English so it was up to us to decypher the train schedule (where many of the town names do not resemble any literal translation of their names in our maps).  We finally figured it out and got our 4 tickets.  As we were walkng away, we realized that we were in a 6 berth cabin but we lost the drive to try to sort that out so we let it be and headed on to Mui Ne.

As usual, we'd sussed out a few spots to check out and went to one of the ones on our list.  It had a pool but they only had the one room available.  It was late and we were all hungry and the lady (an expat US Vietnamese who'd married an Aussie) spoke excellent English so we stayed put.  Unfortunately, we realized that they'd had a huge storm 10 days earlier and their beach was completely washed away.  In |Vietnam, you own/lease right down to the water line so if you want on the beach, you need to strike up some sort of a deal with the owner of the resort.  This wasn't going to work for us so we resolved to find a better place that night.

We had dinner in a nice little place called the Bamboo garden who the hotel owner said had the best food in town.  It was pretty good.  Mui Ne is on the verge of being discovered so it has a mix of large and small resorts and lots of Russians, Germans, etc.  The beach itself reminded me of Long Beach on Phuket without the thousands of beach umbrellas but with hundreds of Kite Surfers.

My wrist has been feeling much better so I was keen to give it a shot in the upcoming days but we learned that 1) it took 3-5 days to learn it, and 2) we only had 2 days of wind and 3 days of beach time.  I did spend a bit of time on the beach watching them rig up and so on and it looks like great fun.  I'd love to come back and learn it properly some day but I'll have to settle to learn it on Lake Simcoe (they do it around Keswick somewhere I'm told).

Most days, we hung around the beach and/or pool and just chilled out until dinner time when the girls would go hunting for bargains.  We did take half a day on a jeep tour and did some hiking up and down a stream bed (very cool to see the sand formations - Shawn was in 7th heaven thinking about all the rocks forming), up and down both white and red sand dunes.  We even rented a couple of small ATV's and let Shawn and Rachel try their hands on the flat bits.  Then they rented a magic carpet and tried tobogganing down the dune (not steep enough).  We also got to see the boats in the fishing village.  I've never seen so many boats in one spot in my life.

Rachel's sand masterpiece

The beach at Mui Ne (that was washed out past where those people are)

Looking south

Yeah, we're roughing it... :-)

Faerie Stream

Rice paddy

Faerie Stream... only about 2 inches deep and nice sandy bottom

That's only about half of them

We'd see these guys out on the middle of the ocean in these "buckets"

Reminds me of St. Peter's Bay in PEI

Round up!

After a few days of this, it was time to get on our night train to Danang so we flagged down a taxi and headed back to the train station.  It was a ghost town except for our ticket lady. Our taxi driver became very suspicious and asked some of the locals about the train which we learned was actually departing from yet another train station about 15 kms away in 30 minutes!  Needless to say, we all piled back in the taxi and made the headlong dash for Binh Than where we managed to pick up our train on time.

When we arrived at the train station, there were lots of people carrying all kinds of stuff.  When we tried to make our way to the tracks, they sent us far away from everyone else... I gathered later that this was because we paid extra for a sleeper cabin.  They were all going steerage up front.  The train pulled in more or less on time and we piled on and went hunting for our cabin.  There were 6 bunks in it (bottom, middle, top on both sides) and a Vietnamese couple had the top/bottom so I climbed in the middle and let Jen/the kids have the three on the other side.  These were "hard sleepers"... basically a 1/2" of thick material and a sheet over plywood.  They were long enough for me though and we managed to try to get some sleep.  The train made 7 stops on the way to Danang, at one point discharging our husband/wife companions and picking up three more (another husband/wife who shared the bottom bunk) and a gentleman who took the top bunk.

It was an experience but next time, we'll make absolutely sure we get soft sleepers.  We left Binh Than at 19:07 and arrived in Danang the next morning at about 11am.  More later.