Nha Trang; the Santa Monica of Vietnam, has held some good and some bad for us. It's a great little city, with plenty to do, lots of sun, and very friendly locals. Since we decided to extend our Visas afterall, we figured if we had to spend a week anywhere to do it, Nha Trang wouldn't be so bad--it hasn't been at all. Because this is essentially a beach town, most of our days here consisted of lounging on the beach, reading, and swimming in the (incredibly salty) ocean.
Seafood was easy to come by in Nha Trang. Here Preston holds up the poor (live) lobster that our friends are about to have grilled up for them. Sad, but tasty.
They grill them right on the street. (Or beach, depending where you happen across these vendors.)
The beach at dusk. Strangely enough, none of the locals hit the beach until well into the evening, at which point it becomes really crowded. This left us with pretty deserted beaches during the day... Fine by us.
But even relaxing can get boring after a few days, so we decided to organize a dive to the Marine National Park, which surrounds an island just off the coast. We booked through Coco Dive Center, a great choice we realized, if only for the size of their boat (the biggest of the lot), as well as their small diving groups (two divers to a Master). For both of us, this was our first dive in over a year and a half and we were a bit nervous, but after Jessica assured Preston that warm water diving is much more enjoyable than mid-winter Pacific Northwest diving--and assured herself that she did in fact remember how to breathe underwater--we had two very successful dives. Our Dive Master for the day, Thanh, brought along his underwater camera and took a TON of great pictures of us during our dives, and despite the ridiculous 15 US dollars he wanted for them, we said we would buy the lot; these pictures really were that cool. However, in our first stroke of "Nha Trang Bad Luck" we came back the next day to find that their computer had crashed, and Thanh had deleted the photos from his camera. Sorry, guys, no photos. So our blog readers can get an idea of what these "incredibly awesome and gnarly dive pictures" would have looked like, we've included a few substitues below (even though Jess still thinks our pictures were better...):
The marine life did look a lot like this...
There was one picture similar to this with Preston silhouetted from below, giving the ubiquitos "diving okay" sign. It was awesome. (Jessica is tearing up just thinking about the real pictures we DON'T have.)
Just kidding.
A couple days after our dive, we decided to head to a different beach just outside of Nha Trang proper; a granite-rock beauty called the Hon Chong Promontory. (Jessica's family: This looks a lot like the Baths!) It was beautiful, and we were able to waste most of the day exploring the rocks and the surrounding beach.
We originally planned to get out of Nha Trang as soon as our Visas came back, but when they did, we couldn't leave due to our second stroke of bad luck: lost bus tickets. Since we have an "open bus ticket" we have to inform them 24 hours in advance when we want to leave, but since, as it turns out, our cleaning lady accidentally threw away our tickets, we couldn't leave just yet. Our hotel was incredibly apologetic, and bought us new tickets, but we still had another day to fill in Nha Trang as a result. So, we signed up for the "Four Island Boat Tour". We don't need to go into the specifics here, because although it might have been fun under other circumstances, our boat was completely overcrowded, and--stroke THREE of bad luck--Preston's "waterproof" camera rendered itself "not waterproof" halfway through the boat trip. AHHHH!! It seems, though, that we were owed some good Karma; we didn't lose any of our pictures (the memory card still worked perfectly fine)! Still, we're down one camera, and his pictures of Nha Trang are stuck on the card at the moment. When we get them off, we'll load some (real) pictures of our dive, as well as some better beach pictures.
Side note: Stroke four of bad luck is that we lost Backgammon... May seem like a tiny issue to the casual reader, but the truth is that that tiny travel game was a serious chunk of our waiting for a bus/plane/boat entertainment. Ha. The things you value the most when traveling...
So tomorrow morning (briiiiiight and early) it's good by Nha Trang, and hello Dalat!
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