Adventures By Design

In which the travelers wave to the pretty ladies

Today was our last day in Nha Trang; we’d booked a sleeper bus to take us to Hoi An in the evening, so we still had the day to hang out on the beach. We confirmed with our hotel that we could stay in our room until 4pm if we paid for a half day, then headed to the beach (our hotel was only $12 a night, so $6 to leave our bags there and have showers after the beach was a good deal).

We had a quick breakfast first, and then headed to our favorite beach chairs to lounge and read. For all of Ric’s complaints about lying on the beach being so boring, we’ve done quite a lot of lying around here in Nha Trang. It’s been great, but Gin is going through books faster than we can replace them! We’re hoping that there will be a good used bookstore in Hoi An.

We stayed on the beach for a couple of hours, periodically trading seats from sun to shade. Both of us have gotten pretty tanned in the last while, so we’re not as worried about sunburn anymore, but Gin still has to worry about her pasty Dutch skin a little bit. Actually, as it turned out today both of us should be worrying a little bit more since we left the beach with minor sun burns, which was weird because we actually spent less time on the beach today than on the day before yesterday, and we were fine then. Apparently the sun was brighter today!

We checked out of our hotel at 4pm, and headed out to kill some time before our bus left at 7:30. We walked around town a bit, got the evil eye from some men guarding a government building that we were looking at, and then had a nice dinner. After dinner we were walking towards our hotel when we noticed that the police were blocking the street to traffic, and they were only occasionally letting pedestrians through narrow gaps in their barricade. This had created quite a bottleneck with people pushing and trying to find a way through. Having no idea what all the commotion was about we just stood back and watched for a while. Eventually the crowds thinned for a moment and we scurried through to the other side. All those people were rushing to the other end of the street, where it joined the street that runs along the beach. Here thousands of Vietnamese were gathering; we joined the crowds lining the sidewalks and wondered what could be happening. Eventually we realized this was all to do with the Miss Universe pageant which is being held in Nha Trang next week. There was a parade of floats coming down the street with all the Miss Such-and-Suches on them waving to the crowds. We watched the spectacle for a while and saw Miss Vietnam (naturally, the crowd’s favorite) and Miss Canada (who wasn’t as popular with the locals, but still pretty).

We left Nha Trang this evening on a ‘sleeper bus’; this was a new experience for us. Sleeper buses are large buses with seats that recline to a near-horizontal position, ostensibly allowing a person to sleep. Our bus had two rows (top and bottom) of three bunks across (two beside the windows and one in the middle). There is a space to place your feet and beneath your chair is a tiny cubbyhole to store your shoes. Everyone was provided with a blanket and a bottle of water. Our bus was relatively well-designed and it would probably have been quite comfortable for the right shaped person, however, for us (Ric especially) it quickly became cramped. First, the space for Ric’s feet was too short, so his toes went numb. The seats were too narrow for Ric’s shoulders and there were no arm rests, so whenever he fell asleep his arms would hang down, and his screaming muscle cramps would wake him up. Finally, as he was at the back of the bus in the middle, Ric was directly under the air-conditioner vents, which blasted freezing air all night. Overall, although it wasn’t a pleasant trip, and we won’t be taking a sleeper bus again, we’re glad we did it: sleeper buses are one of those things that every traveler should check off her list of things to do when visiting Vietnam.