Nha Trang, on the beach in Vietnam

We took a plane from Danang to Nha Trang. At Danang Airport you had in true socialist fashion a wide choice (of destinations):
















Fortunately, there was one other flight (i.e. ours) to Nha Trang.

Nha Trang is one of Vietnam's favourite beach locations. And - to be honest - we were quite ready for a few days of relaxing on a beach.

Well, we were in for a bit of a surprise: Rather than a nice sleepy seaside village with sandy beaches and palm trees moving gently in the wind ... we arrived in what looked (and sounded!) like Hanoi-by-the-sea:















All rather busy and chaotic. Compounded with the fact that Sabine and Lucy were suffering from a tummy bug, morale was a bit low when we arrived here.

And didn't really get better when the hotel rooms that we got turned out to be windowless. Argh!!!

So we had a bit of a negotiating session with the hotel front desk staff and in the end came out victorious and got "upgraded" (!) to rooms with a window. Things were starting to look up again...

...and got even better when we saw in the next street from the hotel the restaurant sign "Good Morning Vietnam":















These restaurants, founded by an Italian, have - no doubt - "saved" quite a few Western tourist in Vietnam before. They have great authentic Italian food. And so we indulged into some proper spaghetti and pizza (...after all there are only so many spring rolls and portions of fried rice one can eat).

We took things easy here in Nha Trang. We relaxed and got our laundry done (70 pieces / 9.3 kg total weight - all for about US 12). And soon our tummies and mood were better again...

And we saw that once you left the busy city (traffic) behind, that Nha Trang has a really long sandy beach, including one or two beautiful restaurants right on the beach.

With everyone being fit again, yesterday we undertook a daylong boattrip for some snorkeling. After the fantastic Great Barrier Reef snorkeling experience we were wondering how this would compare. To start with it was only 10% of the price of the snorkeling daytrip in Australia. Well, OK, the boats for the snorkeling trip here didn't exactly compare with the modern high-speed catamarans in Cairns:















But the snorkeling itself was surprisingly good. We stopped at two places which both had corals and fish in abundance. A local guy even showed me a lionfish which was quite beautiful. Plus I saw - what I thought were - 3 long seasnakes, but they turned out to be rather long seacucumbers.

I had completely forgotten the time while snorkeling and so when I returned to then boat I realized - rather embarrassingly - that the whole boat had just waited for me. As "punishment" I got a big sunburn on my back from all the snorkeling.

Lunch was on the boat and a pretty enjoyful affair:















We finished off the day with another meal at our favourite restaurant "Good morning Vietnam". There we also met again a Dutch family with whom we had already shared the boat trip in Halong Bay. In fact, there are few Western families (Dutch, Swiss and English) who we first saw at Halong Bay and who we keep bumping into on our trip through Vietnam - ...they seem to have the same itinary as we. It strangely reassuring to see these familiar Western faces again (and to trade stories, which are mostly about the things people saw and the little illnesses they had contracted along the way.)

Today we are off to the airport again. For another Vietnamese Airlines flight - this time to Ho Chi Minh City (the old Saigon).