I've been having difficulty updating my blog the last couple of days. Some internet cafes here can't seem to load the Blogger start page at all, and those that do are so painfully slow that updating takes forever. At least Flickr works consistently.
The town of Mui Ne is a small fishing village on the southeastern coast of Vietnam, about a five hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City. It has a reputation for being much quieter and less commercialized than Nha Trang, the main beach resort town in Vietnam. The village itself is a dense group of narrow dirt side streets splitting off the paved main street for about fifteen blocks. The market on the south side of town is smaller than the others that I've seen in Vietnam and there's not much to do in town.
A long, nice beach stretches along the shore to the south for several miles. The road that runs out of town to the south stays several hundred yards from the beach and hotels are packed side by side, facing the ocean. A variety of restaurants, small shops, and travel agencies are located across the road on the inland side. The road itself is not very aesthetic, but the beachfront makes up for it.
The tour bus that Tiffany and I took from Dalat deposited up at a travel office just next to a hotel that was charging twelve dollars a night for their rooms. It seemed a little steep, but since we had planned to split the cost, and the hotel was quite nice, we decided to stay there instead of walking around bargain shopping. One of the reasons that the tour buses are cheap in Vietnam is because they are subsidized by the restaurants they visit and the hotels where they choose to end. I don't like being shepherded into a hotel at the end of a bus trip, but if the hotel is reasonable, and the staff is not too pushy, it's alright.
There are several sights around Mui Ne other than the nice beach. On Tuesday, Tiffany and I rented a motorbike for about three dollars and visited the white sand dunes, the red sand dunes, and a small canyon. We spent so much time at the first dunes, that we did not get to see the waterfall, the Cham Tower, or the lighthouse. It was refreshing to have our own transportation and choose what to see and when to see it.
The white sand dunes were definitely the highlight. The white sand dunes are about ten miles north of Mui Ne and the road that leads to them has fantastic views of undeveloped coastline. The map we were using was drawn in an inappropriate scale on the back of a business card advertising our hotel, but after asking directions once or twice, we found our destination.
We arrived at the parking area just as another tourist couple we had seen previously pulled up. They had also rented a motorbike but had not asked for helmets and had mentioned earlier that our helmets were a good idea. We sat down at the small shack at the trail head and ate lunch with them: Guy, a Frenchman, and his Serbian girlfriend, whose name I forgot. Guy spoke almost no English and his girlfriend spoke English about as well as I speak French, so we all got to practice languages other than our first.
After lunch, we rented plastic mats to use as sand sleds and hiked over to the highest dune we could find. The dunes stretched for perhaps five square miles and beyond, the countryside was dry grassland over rolling hills as far as we could see inland. It reminded me more of pictures I have seed of Africa than Vietnam. We spent perhaps an hour goofing around on the dunes, sledding, rolling, jumping, and running down them.
Guy and his girlfriend had to get their motorbike back by five in the evening, so we decided to caravan back towards town, looking for the red rock canyon. About halfway back we spotted it and pulled over. The canyon sat at the end of a trail about a hundred yards above the road, overlooking the ocean. The red "rock" was actually more eroded dirt, like parts of Bryce Canyon, but much, much smaller. We explored the whole thing in about five minutes.
After the canyon, Tiffany and I stopped at the red sand dunes, which were neither as big or as steep as the white dunes, and only spent a few minutes there. On our way back through town, we stopped at the fishing beach, took pictures of sunset, fooled around with some school children and bought some snacks from a street vendor.
A lot of our time on Mui Ne was spent arranging travel in the coming days. The Tet Festival complicates all aspects of touring. All domestic airplanes and trains are booked, buses and accommodations are more expensive, and I'm fairly certain that the unfavorable dong exchange rate that just changed the other day is also related.
The beach in front of our hotel was a nice place to relax from the sometimes stressful business of figuring out our itineraries. It was not a wide beach, probably only fifty feet from the hotel to the water, but the views both up and down the coast were beautiful.
On Wednesday afternoon, Tiffany and I boarded our buses, mine to Hoi An, and hers to Ho Chi Minh City. It has been nice to have such a good travel partner, and it was sad to part after only a few days.
My bus ride from Mui Ne was long and a little trying. The tour operators tried to seat a group of older French tourists in the aisle of the bus on plastic chairs, but they very obstinately refused and gave up getting on our bus. During our stop in Nha Trang, a woman boarded the bus without a ticket and then refused to either get off or buy a ticket for ten minutes. Then after the sun set, our bus driver played chicken with the oncoming headlights while passing slower traffic on the two lane highway. We drove overnight and arrived in Hoi An at about eight o'clock in the morning.
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