Nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, Nha-traaaang! (to the tune of Batman). Cough, anyway.
Me and the two boys called Archie I adopted in Hue arrived in Nha Trang stupidly early in the morning. No hostel would have us, so we checked into a very fancy hotel with towels and showers and AC and TVs. The only problem with it was that it only had one double bed. Not wanting to get arrested, I offered to sleep on the floor on the duvet, which was actually quite comfortable. It was pretty damn expensive though, so we checked out the following day to the local backpacker haunt – Backpackers (original).
Nha Trang is pretty famous for its 6km stretch of white sandy beach, so we headed there after breakfasting at noon. Since it was such a nice place to stay, we spent 3 whole afternoons here, lazing around on the beach sunburning, or breaking our bones trying to body surf in the 10 foot high breaking waves. Here’s my friend Jon – who I also met in Hue, and randomly checked into my same dormroom a few days later – doing his best Pamela Anderson impression on the beach. It really was beautiful (the beach, not Jon’s impression).
It was exhausting though, all that reading and suntanning and relaxing, so afternoon’s were spent in little local restaurants, recovering in the shade with cold drinks and random dishes of food from the menus.
The evenings were whiled away in the little bar outside the hostel. Starting off with pool, we would migrate outside to tables to play drinking games with strangers (learning way too many personal details about each other than I was comfortable with), before finally stumbling to the Why Not bar, where all manner of lecherous activities were excused under this banner.
This is all I pretty much did. It was the first proper beach I had visited since Phuket months before, so wasn’t particularly ready to give it up for a day of sightseeing or activity-doing. The others felt differently on the last full day, so went off to some water park – where one of them got slapped by a little Russian boy (I was a little sad to have missed that).
The next morning, we all split up. I was headed straight to Ho Chi Minh City, while the Archies were off to Dalat (a town overrun by sand dunes) and Jon was heading home.