Mortal Coil

Update, July 12 2011
Thanks to WordPress.com featuring this on their “Freshly Pressed” section on July 11th, 2011, this photo report post has had a tremendous amount of traffic, thanks entirely to you lovely folks who have chosen to bestow your click-favours. I might add in an oh-so-cheeky way that more of my photographic travel delights can be found in the Travel Photography posts section (let’s be honest, the most interesting part of this blog for blogger and reader alike)…

Also, for your delectation, I have other Vietnam photo posts as well:

• Saigon
• Hội An
• Huế and Sapa
• Hà Nội and Hạ Long Bay

Original post
After the hectic experience of Saigon, desirous of some sun and fun, we headed north out of the city towards the southern coastal resorts of Mũi Né and Nha Trang. Never ones to sit around on the beach, we did a fair bit of exploration in each place, seeing how the people in both towns were getting to grips with combining their traditional lifestyles (fishing, mostly) with increasing numbers of tourists and their various demands and proclivities.

Mũi Né
We knew that Mũi Né was going to be our first stop as we headed north, because it was a pretty manageable five-hour bus ride from Saigon. Having investigated a bit and determined that the main strip of Mũi Né looked like a catastrophic mix of Russian, German and Australian package tour hellholes, we booked a bungalow in the private resort Pandanus just outside the main strip. As the man in Indiana Jones said, we chose…. wisely. We hired some bicycles the first afternoon and toddled down into the fishing village north of the resort strip, where we were lucky enough to see the fishing harbour just as dusk approached. It was our first encounter with the curious rattan “bathtub” dinghies that are such a feature of waterfront life in south Vietnam.

The next day we hired scooters, and took to them like ducks to water. Riding around a relatively low-population area like Mũi Né was the perfect way to start driving in Vietnam – not sure I would have wanted to kick things off in Saigon, for instance. Happily we carried on through the main resort strip and south to Phan Thiết, the main fishing town near Mui Ne, where we knew we’d be able to see some Cham temples, and also look into a fishing harbour I had seen from the bus the day before.

First stop was the Cham temples on a hilltop overlooking the town: leftovers of the old religions of the Cham people, who are still around in greatly reduced numbers and greatly reduced influence. The only other visitors to this temple complex were a bridal couple and their photographers, who were happy to pose for us in between having their love committed to digital eternity….

After the Cham temples we continued on down to the main fishing section of Phan Thiết and, after struggling to work out how to get to the actual quay-side from the main street, we eventually just did as the locals did and drove our scooters into a warren of tiny rutted alleyways, somehow managing not to scrape ourselves or our bikes down the sides of people’s houses, till eventually we popped out on the quay and got to see some of the fishing boats and dinghies at close quarters, and to see what conditions the fishermen lived in when they weren’t out casting for squid and scallops…

We were tempted to keep going around a headland as we saw a beach on the other side that looked like it needed investigating. However, the pavement and packed earth had run out and in between us and the beach was the motorcycle’s bane: sand. We were about to turn around and give up when a toothless grandmother laughed at us and pointed through the sand. Shamed, we duly attempted and conquered the sand challenge. When we came to the beach we dismounted and walked down to observe some scallop fishermen freshly arrived and disgorging their catch via the dinghies to women waiting on shore, who were busily shucking the scallops and discarding the shells onto the beach in great mounds (there were countless thousands of old shells about). It was a fascinating scene, and they were very surprised that we as tourists had made it around to see them. They were friendly enough, though, and we felt we were well off the trail.

I don’t want to over-romanticise this experience though; the beach was filthy, very different to the sanitised versions at the resorts nearby which were cleaned obsessively. This beach was an environmental disaster of discarded shells, rubbish, excrement, and a recently-dead dog. The entire place smelled like three-day-old shit, and we made our excuses. Getting back off the beach involved driving through someone’s patio (seriously) and driving through a family of four eating their dinners on either side of an alleyway, who only pulled their dishes and drinks away at the last moment. We continued back into the main resort strip and found a place for lunch, where we remarked that the three-day-old shit smell seemed to pervade the town. It was only a few minutes later that we discovered to our horror that I had trod in some of the three-day-old shit and was tracking it around. This was special stuff, probably banned under the Geneva convention, and suffice it to say that after multiple cleaning attempts and an overnight soak I was forced to throw this set of beloved sandals away. That’s some serious shit.

The next morning we got up early and walked down the road from our resort to climb the red sand dunes, a famous local attraction which is probably best explored using a jeep, and the main idea is to do sand-surfing – or at least that’s what all the touts would have you do. Of course I skipped the sand-surfing and went photo-surfing instead….

Of course, we didn’t spend all of our time sightseeing. There was a beach to play in, as well, and we did. But nobody wants to see other people’s beach pictures, so I’ll suffice with this one:

Nha Trang
After three days and two nights in Mũi Né we decided to push up the coast to Hoi An, with a one-night stopover in Nha Trang, another beach resort, to break up what would otherwise be an 18-hour bus journey. As it happened, the five hours to Nha Trang did us in, as we had inadvertently booked a sleeper bus – for an afternoon journey. It was fairly hellish, let’s just leave it there. Once in Nha Trang we agreed that we needed to find some other way to continue on to Hoi An the next day. As it happens the urgency of this decision was removed from us by some dodgy shellfish and an ensuing everything-must-go bout of food poisoning. So we ended up spending two nights in Nha Trang, recuperating and preparing for the next journey. As it happened we lodged in the Sheraton on the main strip, so this was not what you would call a hardship to extend our stay. We checked out the town, but it was roasting hot during the day so we mostly explored at night (somehow seeming to end up at the Sailing Club each night) or during the early mornings.

The view from our hotel’s rooftop terrace was pretty striking at night, watching untold thousands of scooters cruising up and down the strip, and the otherworldly construction side next door:

Of course we did manage to get out onto the beach here, and because it was the start of a bank holiday weekend there, there were genuine Vietnamese tourists visiting the beach in droves:

Early on the final morning in Nha Trang we went up to the fishing marina and saw the fishermen getting about their work. We carried on around the bay to another set of Cham temples on a hill overlooking the harbour.

That was it for Nha Trang, and we headed out to catch our chosen “cheating” transportation up to Hoi An: Vietnam Airlines.

You can see more photos of Mũi Né and Nha Trang in my Flickr set here.

Next time: A photo report from the charming old colonial town of Hoi An. Reports from Hue, Saigon, Sapa, and Ha Long Bay will follow…