Days 134 – 136: Nha Trang

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2059945&l=fa338&id=1101094

I arrived at Nha Trang the following morning after a surprisingly restful ride on the night bus; although I hadn’t paid extra for a sleeping bus, I ended up on one anyway, and so I spent the night in a “bed” of sorts instead of a seat.

I escaped the clutches of the motorbike drivers who had swarmed around the bus, walked into town, found a dorm bed for $3, and dropped my pack. After a day wandering around frenetic Saigon, I wanted one thing: peace and quiet on the beach.

I found the beach without problem, but the peace and quiet was a bit harder to come by. Actually, it was nowhere to be found. Even at nine in the morning, the beach was swarming with locals selling everything from books to fruit to massages. I was one of the first foreigners on the beach, but as I learned in visiting India during the low tourist season, that doesn’t make things any better: when you’re the only foreigner, you get all the attention.

All I wanted was to sit on the beach and read, but every minute or so a different hawker would walk up and try to sell me something. I tried ignoring them, but that didn’t work—they just kept saying, “Sir, you buy something?” until I acknowledged them. Then, even after I glanced up and said, “Kom, kam ern” (No thank you), or just “No” if I was feeling lazy, they continued to stand there and ask me to buy something. One of their favorite lines was “You buy now, happy hour! Cheap for you!” Apparently, it is always happy hour in Nha Trang.

Despite my insistence that I didn’t want to buy anything, it took anywhere from fifteen to 30 seconds to get rid of each hawker, and it was only another minute before the next one arrived. And the worst part was that there was no end to the game—the same hawkers kept returning, somehow expecting that my willingness to buy a French romance novel had changed in the past fifteen minutes.

One little girl was so annoying and so persistent that I agreed to buy a bag of chips from her if she would agree to leave me alone for the rest of the day. That was the best 30 cents I ever spent.

Not surprisingly, I got very little reading done. I tried taking a nap for a while, but that didn’t work either, because the hawkers woke me up to ask me if I wanted something to eat or drink. “NOOOOOO!”

The beach itself was wide, golden, and fringed with palm trees, though it wasn’t particularly clean. I was always impressed with how clean Thai beaches were, even when there were loads of tourists on them, but the same thing doesn’t seem to be true of Vietnamese beaches. One fellow backpacker that I talked to argued that Thailand is more aware of the benefits of tourism, and as a result keeps its natural treasures clean to keep the tourists coming. That logic could also explain the exuberant friendliness of Thais compared to their Vietnamese counterparts.

Over the course of the day the beach gradually filled with foreigners, and the hawker visits because less frequent, although they never ceased entirely. The weather was quite nice—lots of sun, and plenty warm for a swim every once in a while. But in the afternoon the wind picked up, and by 4pm sand was flying into my eyes and I decided to call it a day.

That night I ate at an Indian restaurant that was run by an immigrant from New Delhi. We talked about my travels through India a bit, and he told me about his new life in Vietnam. Apparently, things are going quite well for the guy—after his restaurant in Nha Trang did well, he opened satellites in Hoi An and Hue, to similar results. I guess after nonstop noodle soup, every tourist likes a little Indian curry.

The following morning I caught a boat to Hon Mun (Mun Island), which sits about 10km off the Nha Trang coast. The idea was to do some snorkeling, but at the first place the boat stopped it was so windy that waves kept knocking me onto my back. And the waves also kicked up the sand from the ocean floor, making visibility practically nonexistent.

The second stop was inside a semi-sheltered bay, which mostly fixed the wind problem. The reef here was decent, but not quite as good as southern Thailand, and not anywhere near as good as Sumatra. And the species of fish were largely the same. I spent an hour or so in the water, but after that I got quite cold—the water temperature, after all, was only about 72 degrees.

Back in Nha Trang, I spent the afternoon on the beach and dealt with similar hassles from the hawkers. The strange thing is that I didn’t see anyone buying anything from these folks, especially from the ones selling sunglasses, books, and hair clips. I assume that the business must be profitable considering the number of people who do it, but the mechanics of the thing are a mystery to me.

The next morning I rented a motorbike and explored greater Nha Trang. I visited a few temples and some ruins of the Cham civilization that were originally built in the 7th Century, and then I swung back to the coast to visit a rock formation called Hon Chong Promontory that was essentially a collection of granite boulders jutting out into the ocean. I was overjoyed to find an attractive beach just north of the promontory—it wasn’t quite as wide as the main beach in Nha Trang, but it was free of hawkers, and at this point that was all I cared about. Unfortunately, after only a half hour on the beach the clouds rolled in and the wind picked up, and at one point the gusts were so strong that they knocked my motorbike over. Eventually I gave up on the beach, drove back into town, and spent my last hour in Nha Trang reading of the scandalous behavior of Miss Lydia Bennet and Mr. George Wickham. Thank goodness for Mr. Darcy.