February 15, 2017

We could have by-passed Nha Trang, but then we would have missed a lovely Indian meal.

We actually had a rest day today. Nothing planned just relaxing. We had a leisurely breakfast at one of the little restaurants in the square and got chatting to a French Canadian from Montreal. He has been coming to Vietnam for about 10 years, mainly in the Nha Trang area. However, he is not happy about the influx of the Russians and the Chinese. In his opinion they have no class.

He has an “adopted” daughter who lives partly in Vietnam and partly in Canada. She has her Canadian citizenship, and graduated from High School and College in Canada. Her family live in the Mekong area and she is one of eleven. One of her sister’s lives in Sweden.

Yves was a very interesting guy and gave us a lot of insight into Vietnam. Although we had picked up a lot of what he was telling us. We had a laugh about the building “code”, he told us that the hotels etc are only built to last for 15 to 20 years maximum. My advice is know how old your hotel is before you book it, if it is close to the end of its lifespan it will be a very grubby old hotel.

After our very leisurely breakfast we headed out for a very relaxed walk along the sea front. This area was reserved for motorbike/scooter parking – imagine trying to find your bike after having a few drinks.

It was very blustery, there were some Russians on the beach, and one fella ready to go in for a swim.

Nha Trang is a large, busy, bustling, holiday city. It has a long sandy beach that stretches the length of the town about 2 kms. There are a lot of rules for the beach area, which was very interesting reading.

The sea is very rough and has quite the drop-off close to shore, which means when the waves roll in they crash onto the beach. I think you have to be a very strong swimmer to be able to swim in this area. We were told the sea is a lot calmer in the summer.

As we cycled into town yesterday, there was a large unusual building.

Today we walked to it and discovered that we could go to the top and get a good view of the Town. The third floor was dedicated to fallen soldiers. Surprisingly, most of the dates were pre-1955, most of them pertained to the fight against the French in the 1930’s.

There is a wide park area between the beach and the main downtown area.  The Vietnamese always have these park areas, very well maintained.  The Parks Department were working on redoing the planters at the centre of this roundabout.

Nha Trang has hundreds of restaurants and bars. It was so nice to get a choice of food tonight, ranging from BBQ, Indian, Thai and lots of fresh seafood restaurants. Most of the seafood was shellfish, I can’t eat shellfish, we gave those a miss.

We noticed the Indian restaurant had a set menu for 125,000VND ($7.35). We chose to eat an Indian meal tonight and it was really good – poppadoms with mango chutney, vege curry (for me) chicken tandoori (for Ralf), rice, garlic nan bread and a soft drink. The restaurant had proper tables and chairs and was indoors, the service was really good.

We had thought about having a massage today, but after eating a good lunch and a big dinner, we opted to have an early night.

A lovely rest day.