Mui Ne

Hon Rom is part of Mui Ne, a cove where those who make their living on the sea dock in for shelter in times of bad weather. It's a developing tourist community, with several beach-side resorts already catering to foreign tourism. Land was up for sale, with signs advertising this along the highway.




Mui Ne is part of the city Phan Thiet. The air was constantly humid from the sea breeze, and everything steel easily rusted. The main commerce was seafood and seashell souvenirs; those who didn't live on the waters sailed out early before dawn in motorboats or very tiny, round, basket-like boats made for one. They then docked on the shore near the beach-side resorts and offered to cook their catch for paying tourists. One of the puns for Mui Ne is "dodging mosquitoes," but they abounded in the resort area, along with "fire ants" that packed a mean sting. Note the abdomen-to-thorax ratio in the photo below. I have pictures to prove the aftermath of their sting, but I think I'll spare you.



The city Phan Thiet is the home of dragon fruits; we drove past acres of these adorable plants with thick, rope-like leaves hanging down like dreadlocks, the pinkish-red fruits peeking out like shy children from behind their mothers' skirts.




The sea was much saltier in Hon Rom than in Nha Trang, but the waves were much calmer, which made for a nice swim. After only 20 minutes, I tasted the sea at the back of my throat, a persistent bitterness mixed with the heavy saltiness that remained for the rest of the day. We returned our hotel room early and headed off to Saigon. On the way back, we dropped by Tung's grandpa's brother to pay a visit. Tung's grandma pretended to ask for shelter from the rain and waited to see if he recognized his sister-in-law.


Tung took 40 winks while his grandma finished her visitations.


We saw a baby cobra hugging one of the flower pots in front of the house. This is kind of a common thing. I'll spare you the details of what happened to that snake.



We also docked by the Champa ruins ("Thap Cham") to see red-clay ruins built by the Cham people, who sported colorful red head scarves for their traditional attire. The temples were made famous by a handsome poet and songwriter, Hang Mat Tu, whose sweet poetry wooed many beautiful women, but he never took a wife because he developed leprosy. In one of his famous songs, he proposed to sell the moon to anyone willing to buy it. Mong Cam, one of his lovers, died recently at over 90 years old. Up until her death, she would climb the worn roads up to the ruins, sit on the red bricks where once the famous poet sat, and write her own poetry, thinking of him.





Inside the temple, there was a little shrine on the floor with incense offerings. The interior felt cool and looked like a tall chimney, hollow and black all the way to the unseeable top.



The view at the back of the temple, overlooking the city of Phan Thiet and Mui Ne's sea in the distance, was truly spectacular, the stuff that inspires poetry and song.

Phan Thiet

It still rained in Nha Trang with no sign of letting up, which was unfortunate because we were holding out to visit VinPearl Island, where the last Miss Universe Pageant was held. International events hardly ever come to Viet Nam, so being host to a show like that was something big. Another "appetizer" for the next Viet Nam trip, I suppose.




We decided to head off to Phan Thiet. On the way out of Nha Trang, it became apparent that we left at just the right time; rain water had flooded to as high as 3.5 feet.



Residents waded along the murky water to get to and from their houses. Motorbike drivers sported opaque raincoats and tried to navigate through the dry parts of the road. Larger tour buses and minivans sloshed through the water, spraying jet streams on both sides of their tires.



In Phan Thiet, the rain finally went away. We passed gardens of coconut trees and golden fields of grains, tended by rice farmers and their water buffalos.






The rich red soil and fertile green lands gave way to cool blue oceans and red sand.




Phan Thiet is known for its salt production, and along the road, we saw man-made ditches where ocean water overflow was left to evaporate until salt rocks formed, crystals of white lining the slopes and waiting to be harvested and purified.






We made a pit stop in Suoi Cat, whose natural peaks and valleys of dunes made a good environment for sand-sledding.



On a side note, the restroom at one of the roadside beverage shops was the worst I've stepped in, and by now I've seen a few. Ironically, the place served the best coconuts we've had, to date.




Young kids waited by the roadside with blue plastic boards that they rented out to any tourists who docked by. As soon as we got off the van, they swarmed in and invited us to rent the boards from them. They followed us all the way up to one of the lower sand peaks and offered us the plastic sleds for $10,000 dong each. Sensing our skepticism at the sharp incline of the slope, they offered to ride with us on the trip down. Our party wanted to head off and find a hotel before nightfall, so Tung and I didn't get a chance to ride the sand slopes.



We went bargain-hunting for hotels along the beach coast and finally settled on Hon Rom 2, which advertised $400,000 dong/night ($24 US), but we were able to get a rate of $300,000 dong/night ($18 US). I never thought we could bargain for hotel rates, but I guess in Viet Nam, anything's game. I bought a pack of 10 postcards for $30,000 dong (18 US cents a postcard), and the entire part screamed that it was a rip-off. To compensate for my initial bargaining ignorance, though, I got $6,000 dong off a whole soursop fruit (I bought it at $8,000 dong/kilogram instead of the original $20,000 asking-price. That's a whole 35 US cents off, mind you).

Nha Trang

After leaving Phan Rang, we arrived late in the evening at Nha Trang, the city of beaches. The hotel we meant to stay at, a 3-star called Hai Yen, was booked and only had a few rooms with twin beds left, and the wedding party doing karaoke at the hotel's restaurant didn't encourage us to stay. A little down the street, we found Ocean Hotel, a 2-star that had rooms with double beds for half the rate. The hotel offers a breakfast buffet for only $25,000 dong, less than $2 US. It also offers free but really crappy internet where common email sites are barred by privacy restrictions, but porn sites are easily accessible. Also available for our viewing pleasure are cockroaches the size of American mice. But all that aside, they do strive for good service; bellhops are ready and waiting to help bring our luggage upstairs without ever expecting a tip, and the concierge personnel are all very helpful. Here's the view of the beach from our hotel room:

Today, I battled the ocean and got a massage from a blind woman. In the morning, we went to Nha Trang's beach and braced ourselves against the waves as they rolled in to meet us. They say the salty ocean water cleanses the body's minor injuries, including the mosquito bites that had been leaving huge, red-purple scars on my legs.



I had reef shoes on for fear of stepping into something I wouldn't want to, but I eventually abandoned them to feel the gritty grains of sand beneath the soles of my feet and between my toes. Even the baby waves reminded me of the ocean's mightiness--they slapped at me and knocked me down until I was submerged in a flurry of sand and salty sea. I went out to meet the rolling waves on their way in, riding them to shore on my belly for an adrenaline rush. I cocooned myself in the waters like an embryo in a womb, letting them deliver me back to land.



It started to rain in Nha Trang shortly after our beach trip, so we found ourselves stranded in the hotel room most of the time. Di Ha wanted to try the massage service, which we had to call for. About 20 minutes later, two young ladies came to our hotel room, one of them blind. It cost $60,000 dong (about $3.50 US) for a full-hour massage, a service offered by the hotel to help the visually-impaired find work. The blind girl ended up giving me the massage.

What must it feel like to see more with the hands than with the eyes? Right away, I sensed the difference in how she'd probe first with her fingers to get a sense of my body's terrain and my position on the bed. She'd tuck her knees close to my side to better orient herself, skipping her fingertips down my spine to see how tall I am. The massage itself was a mixture of relaxation and pain, because sometimes she did press and squeeze really hard.

Nha Trang's main commerce is fishing, and the city is known for its fresh seafood. In the early morning, men would take their tiny tub of a boat out to sea and then come back in with their catch and sell it to the restaurants lining the shore.



We ate lunch at Ngon Hai Dang Restaurant, where the seafood was so fresh that we were asked to come select our choice of crabs and then choose how we'd like them prepared. The restaurant's pricing is considered ritzy by locals, but it's still cheaper than in the US. We ended up ordering 5 crabs, prepared different ways. My favorite was sauteed in tamarind sauce. By the end of that lunch, I had had my fill of crab for the year.






The breakfast buffet at the hotel was one of the best parts. There was a modest selection of food choices, but each dish was freshly made and tasted so much better than a lot of US buffets. The hotel chef cooked sunny-side-up eggs and the main hot dish of the morning on the spot. During our stay, it was "bun bo hue" (spicy beef noodle soup) and "bun cha ca" (vermicelli in fish stock). The chef was curious how his culinary skills compared to the chefs in Saigon, the "big city," and asked our opinion on his dishes.


During our stay at Ocean Hotel, a historic even occurred. Viet Nam beat Thailand 3-2 in soccer in the Southeast Asia Championship game, winning the country's first international title. I'm not a sports person, but it's "the thing" in Viet Nam, and men are more riled up over a game of soccer than US football fans around Thanksgiving--to the point of being zealots. My mom knew an old man whose death wish was for his sons to carry him to the soccer stadium to see one last live game.

Life visibly stopped as the game drew to a close--people gathered around TVs in homes and in public. Anyone's TV could become public property as people magnanimously left open their front doors so complete strangers could mosey in and watch. The flickering blue glare from TV screens could be seen on spectators' hypnotized faces as we drove past; the entire city held its breath for an outcome that would go down into the small country's sports history. Even our taxi driver couldn't wait to park the van back at the hotel after our dinner. He jumped out to join the gathering crowd of fans clustered around the TV in the lobby.


The smell of smoke hung thick in the air as people continually lit cigarettes in nervous anticipation. And when victory was secured, such a collective cheer rolled through the streets that it truly sounded like the Norse gods bowling. Everyone celebrated through the night, riding through the streets and waving Vietnamese flags. It didn't take long for traffic to come to a complete stand-still. The next morning, everyone was hung over from celebrating, and every newspaper in the country ran the story on its cover page.

Phan Rang

Phan Rang is an agricultural community, and whereas Catholicism is the main religion in Da Lat as apparent by the cluster of churches, Phan Rang contains a lot of Buddhist residents. Temples line both sides of the road as we drive in to pay a visit to Tung's grandma's relatives, and to drop Anh Tinh back home. The few paved roads are cracked and pot-holed from the abuse of large shipping trucks driving on them. Rice paddies with young green shoots lay seeped in muddy brown water, marked off by even squares like a checkerboard landscape.

Most houses are developed enough to look modern instead of the thatch-roof houses I was expecting to see. Anh Tinh's house has electricity, a ceiling fan in the sitting room, tiled floors inside and out, and a hammock strung to one side to catch the breeze from the fan and from outside.

Phan Rang is hot, but very tolerable and even cool in the afternoons because of the constant breeze. At around 3:30PM, the goats are herded home in flocks; at 4:00PM, the sheep come home, bleating and marked off by blue dye on their fleece.

Cows roam near the houses, chewing their cud and munching grass, the protective mothers nipping at the family dog that comes near to play with the calves. The idyllic scene is quiet and peaceful, the hazy, slow-going day's time marked by repetitive farm chores.

Earlier, we visited the graveyard, where a swarm of local kids followed us to the three graves of Tung's maternal great-grandparents.

They put bricks down on mud-seeped paths for us to step on, the older ones making a show out of telling the younger ones to shut up and stop singing for our prayer session. The gang of kids then escorted us back to the car, and as we neared, they started screaming for us to give them money out of charity. We could easily get swarmed by the whole horde if we so much as reached for our wallets, so we hurriedly drove off while they whipped the car with bamboo switches.

Da Lat

The weather in Da Lat is quite cool compared to most of Viet Nam. It feels around 60-75 degrees Fahrenheit. Even locals occasionally vacation to Da Lat to escape the heat, especially in the summer months. Besides its nickname, "The City of Fog," Da Lat is also dubbed "The City of Year-Round Flowers" because the cooler climate is more suitable for fresh flowers to stay fresh. Certainly the marketplace boasts of more fresh-flower vendors than other south-Viet-Nam cities.

Today I had a little adventure running around Da Lat's marketplace by myself while Tung's family went to church in the morning. Tung left his toothbrush back in Saigon, so I had our taxi driver take me to the city's main market and wove my way through stalls and squatting merchants, navigating dried preserves, fresh vegetables, flowers, and cookware to finally find a "general store" stall that sold toothbrushes and nail clippers.

I then dropped by the post office so I could pick up a new calling card to reload minutes onto our cell phone. The phones here, whether cellular or land-line, are really a hit-and-miss situation. Different districts have different "area codes" that precede the main number--fair enough. However, that code is subjected to change at the discretion of the Telecommunication Powers That Be. Even a government-owned, reliable taxi company such as VinaSun sometimes changes its district code in the middle of nowhere so that calls could not go through. And the phone numbers do not always contain the same amount of digits. Using a SIM-loaded cell to call back to the US is not always guaranteed to work.

After I finished my errands, Anh Hoang drove me around Ho Xuan Huong, "Perfume Lake." Tung said it ironically smelled awful the last time he visited 7 years ago, but they must have cleaned it up since then; in the lazy hours of the afternoon, tourists could take a swan-shaped paddleboat around the lake to catch the breeze.

I also swung by the botanical garden, a well-kept landscape of potted plants and clipped bonsai. Horses drawing carriages decorated with fresh flowers stood ready to take visitors around the park. I think it was the first time I've ever been the only person in a park where you had to buy a ticket to get in; it must have been too early (and slightly drizzly) for sane tourists to venture by.

Later, I met up with Tung's family when they got out of church. Boy, was Tung happy that I found him a toothbrush. One of the attractions in Da Lat is to take a gondola (suspension-cable car), overlooking a scenery of wild forest, groomed farmland, and hills laced with fog in the distance. A one-way ticket costs $40,000 dong. Anh Tinh, Tung's cousin, took at bus to Saigon to meet up with Tung's family half a week after our arrival to Viet Nam. We went with him to South-Central to eventually drop him off at his home in a village in the city of Phang Rang. His family members are farmers, and by normal standards, $40,000 dong ($2.35 US) is enough to buy 4 good restaurant meals. Therefore, it was simply impractical to spend that kind of money on a 15-minute entertainment. Anh Tinh is in his 40's and had never, to-date, taken a gondola ride.



So Tung and I treated him for his first one, and together the three of us stepped into an enclosed carriage. Suspended on a cable, we soared over the lush landscape of leaf-greens, lake-blues, and colorful houses dotting the scene.

The gondola let us off near Thien Vien Truc Lam, a serene Buddhist temple built on a hill, overlooking the beautiful city. In the picture below, from left: Di Ha (Tung's youngest aunt), Tung's grandma, Co Xuan (our unofficial tour guide), Tung's mom, me, and Anh Tinh (Tung's cousin). Tung is the great cameraman behind this awesome picture.

Exotic flowers dotted the gardens, planted in neat boxes or urns with names clearly labeled on blue signs. Bamboo trees and camellia shrubs partially enclose stone benches where people can retreat and relax.

The roofs of the main temple and nearby structures curved up in the classic Chinese design.

A large golden Buddha sat in the main temple, behind an urn holding clusters of burning incense sticks.

Perhaps the most breathtaking sight is the view of the lake. Rumor is, the government may be planning to take over part or all of the land surrounding Truc Lam temple to build roads. I hope this isn't true, but this may be the first and last time that I get to see the lake this way.

Flanked by crisp green pine, dotted with islands of trees, backed by gentle, rolling hills misted at the top with a veil of fog--the serene lake sits, a placid body of water with a smooth, glassy surface.

A picture hardly does it justice--I stand on sacred temple ground, looking out at pure, natural beauty, and I forget that I am a Technical Writer in the busy hub of Silicon Valley. Stress melts out of my pores, and all worries evaporate from my mind. It must be scenes like this where it's possible for monks to fast and lose themselves, where even the most troubled heart can find refuge and retreat into a sea of meditative calm, where we humans are reminded that we come from Nature, and to her we will ultimately return.