Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Vietnam - Day 3
This is long overdue, but it's still fresh in my mind, what happened back in Nam.Day 3, we were to head up north to Mui Ne. It's the resort central of Vietnam, with 80% of the country's resorts situated there. The horror of the trip, we left Ho Chi Minh at 8 in the morning, or at least that was the plan. The other part of the plan was to reach Mui Ne by 2 or 3pm. Well, seems pretty reasonable, travel for 6 or 7 hours to get there. Boy were we in for a surprise. At the 3 hour mark, we weren't even half way there. To cut the long story short. We arrived at the Canary Resort just slightly before 5pm. It was a crazy journey, and everyone was just sleeping throughout the entire journey.
We had a few stopovers. One particularly weird one was a 'milk' station. Their main product for sale was dairy products, from the cows of Vietnam. Fresh milk and yogurt, which was quite tasty, so no regrets. Really good opportunity to stop and stretch too. Another was at this shady restaurant, lots of them didn't like the food, though I personally thought it was alright. Our 3rd stop was a dragon fruit farm, quite interesting, because I never really knew where dragon fruits came from, but after you see the pictures, you'll know. Our last stop before arriving at the resort was a whale temple, really queer belief, but hey, that's their culture.
Dragon Fruit plants
Beautiful colours of dragon fruits
The almost complete skeleton of a whale that landed on the shores of Mui Ne.
The front of the Canary resort at night.
After arriving at the resort, we hit the beach after dropping off our bags, and took a swim in the ocean. Notice it's not the sea, but the ocean, because we were in the Pacific! The ocean bed was just so different. There was seemingly no end to the gradient. I walked out at least 100m from the shore, and the water level wasn't even higher than my waist line. We got out of the water, and headed back to the jacuzzi. Just relaxed and got out all the stress from the long journey. After a while, the sun started to set, B-E-A-U-tiful I tell you. Just a pity that no one had a camera on hand.
Once the sun set, we all took a shower and we decided to head for dinner. The trip to dinner was very interesting. There were 2 bikes and too many people, so we decided to do a ferry service. It was so good to be back on a bike then, both as a pillion and as a rider. Although it was a short ride, but we made the fullest of it. Dinner was good. Fresh seafood; scallops, fish, snail, and other stuff. Different cooking style from here in Singapore, but good nonetheless.
Dinner was short, but it was a good time, with everyone sitting around and just chatting. After dinner, we did another ferry service back to the resort. This time it seemed like a much shorter ride then previously. That was almost the end of the night, till someone suggested dessert. That wasn't the best of ideas, dessert was pathetic comparatively to dinner.
In the end we headed back to the room to relax, and watch a soccer match. Before the match started, I decided to go out for a little fresh air, and some star gazing. First time in my life I saw shooting stars. It wasn't a meteor shower, but on two different occasions I saw stars just across the sky. It was a pleasant surprise, and just amazing.
Well, that's the end of day 3, sadly there wasn't anything that eventful.