The road from from Da Lat to Nha Trang twists and winds down, through pine covered mountains. The road is narrow with sharp curves and vehicles overtake each other, seemingly regardless of blind spots. Several people on our bus throw up and the bus driver’s back-up blithely hands out plastic bags and collects the full ones, chucking them out the door and onto the side of the road.
We arrive in Nha Trang, a fishing town on the South-East coast of Vietnam in the afternoon. Nha Trang is in many ways like most of the cities we’ve visited. It has the ubiquitous book exchanges carrying the ubiquitous books: The Life of Pi, Mr. Nice, The Beach, A Chef’s Tour, countless Dan Brown novels, Bill Bryson books, The Killing Fields, First They Killed My Father and worn and marked up Rough Guides and Lonely Planets in English and French and, on occasion, German.
There are the shops peddling pirated DVDs, including the ever-present Tomb Raider, The Killing Fields and Without Borders. Souvenir shops hawking postcards, Tin Tin books, fatigues-like hats and pants, T-shirts and tank tops with the slogan “Same, Same But Different”, the large gold star that is Vietnam’s insignia, and an outline of Vietnam with the name of the city we’re in emblazoned across the chest.
Street stands tout packets of Oreos and Ritz crackers, Snickers bars and Mars bars, M&Ms and cigarettes. Drink stands sell Mirinda, Coke, Sprite and local sodas that seem to have no flavor beyond sugary sugar. Baguette stands and carts offer baguette with pate or baguette with Laughing Cow cheese. Sidewalk cafes serve pho, noodle soup for breakfast and grilled pork chops and fried eggs over rice for lunch. This last one is our new favorite meal.
Children and women holding babies beg and sell cheap jewelry and postcards. Tuk-tuk and moto (motorcycle) drivers try to pick up fares. Restaurants called El Coyote, Why Not? and Good Morning Vietnam advertise Vietnamese and Western cuisine, catering to tourists homesick for a burger and fries or cottage pie, fish and chips or a banana split.
Nha Trang has all of these components, but it is slower and more relaxed. There’s less traffic and people are friendlier. When we decline their offers, tuk-tuk drivers slowly putter alongside us, giving directions and making conversation.
Our guesthouse is a block from the beach. The rooms are more expensive than we’ve budgeted for, but Willa is so happy playing on the beach and the adjacent park with its climbable stone sculptures, that we commit to staying for a few days.
The first morning, Willa wakes up at 5:30AM and we head out so Johnny can sleep in. Expecting a deserted town, we instead behold people taking their morning constitutionals, walking briskly up and down the streets in pajamas and sneakers and some in fancy slip-on shoes. The park is filled with people performing calisthenics and stretches. The beach and ocean crowded. Breakfast picnics are taking place, bikes are laid on their sides and stacked haphazardly, teenagers play and flirt, chasing each other into the ocean. Women and children swim fully clothed, men in trunks and babies and young children swim naked. Even more striking than all of this activity at 5:30 in the morning, is that it’s so quiet. To have this amount of people and so little noise is surreal. It’s beautiful.
We go to the beach every morning and afternoon. The ocean is placid and dark, like lake water. The sun is silvery and the air foggy; discombobulating and we have no sense of the time.
Wave runners and wakeboarders zip back and forth on the water in the afternoon, but it’s the para-sailers down the beach who pique our interest and we each take a spin out over the ocean. Similar to a pony ride, with every person taken the same route for the same short amount of time, para-sailing is nevertheless exhilarating. To be ‘free’ in the air with the ocean, beach, town and mountains spread out beneath you is incredible. We can’t wait to do it again.
We rent bicycles and ride along the beach and out of the city to the base of the cable cars that travel over the ocean to Vinpearl, an island that’s been transformed into a resort theme park. The cable car ride looks beautiful, but the entertainment portion of our budget went to para-sailing, so we head back to the beach. Willa is fearless in the water and has almost learned to dog-paddle.
Every morning the tide brings in piles of trash that get raked up by the beach cleaners. At breakfast we overhear someone say that the city loads all of the trash onto barges, takes it out to sea and dumps it in the ocean. We don’t know for sure if this is how Nha Trang manages waste but we’re happy to be leaving the next day.
The twelve-hour overnight bus ride to Hoi An is physically excruciating and renders us useless for the next day.
Hoi An is quaint, a historic port town with most of its downtown center mercifully blocked off to cars and trucks. The architecture is a mix of French colonial, Chinese and what Johnny calls ‘emerging nation,’ concrete block architecture. Vegetable garden plots take up several blocks within the city. Potted plants and flowers crowd entry-ways and balconies. Covered wells serve as roundabouts for bicycles and motorcycles. Hoi An is quite charming. It also seems to be almost entirely dedicated to tourists and shoppers.
There are literally entire city streets dedicated to tailors and dress shops and shoe shops. Clusters of stores selling lanterns and boutiques with ethnic fans, conical hats, dishware, artwork and clothing. The market takes up several city blocks, but is the least impressive one we’ve been to, geared as it is toward tourists.
We happen upon a fantastic pho cafe. We sit down at one of the many round communal tables and within minutes each have a steaming bowl of noodle soup with grilled beef in front of us. No menus and no ordering. This is the only item served. We return several times, afterward stopping at a sundries stand to buy the wrapped frozen ice cream sundae-in-a-cones we’ve become addicted to.
We bicycle out to the beach and play hide-and-seek with Willa between the coconut trees. It starts to rain, then pours and we get drenched on our ride back. It’s a great relief from the heat, the cool air and rain pelting us.
We bicycle across the river to the residential section of Hoi An, down the sandy lanes between rows of cottages. We park our bikes and walk across a bamboo footbridge. In the late afternoon sun, giant fishing nets in the river, like trapeze safety nets, are slowly lowered and raised by a manual wooden wheel. Old women pass by on the bridge. Their bodies disappear into the high grass on the other side until only their conical hats bobbing above are still visible. The sun is starting to set and we collect our bikes and head home.
