Thursday 21 November 2013

Mui Ne by the sea

After Ho Chi Minh we headed to the coast - more specifically the town of Mui Ne.

Turns out that the Vietnamese coast is a magnet for Russians - so we were assaulted by signs in Russian as soon as we got off the bus. The taxi ride to our guest house highlighted how far out we were - the beach is 4km long! So we decided to just stay one night and get all the attractions done in the morning.

A bike ride back into the centre lead us to the main attraction of Mui Ne - kitesurfing. Not wanting to drop $70 on a lesson meant we couldn't really join in with this so we sufficed with watching. What makes Mui Ne so good for kitesurfing - namely the wind - made it less attractive for us to sit on the beach and get sand blown! 


Burgers at Phat Burger satisfied our western food cravings - hmmm especially for cheese!

So what did we get up at 4am the next day to do?!

Ideally it would have been to see sunrise over the sand dunes - however our driver didn't turn up at the right time (he said he was early and the gate was locked - shoulda tried harder...), so we saw sunrise from the road outside the guest house. Luckily our guest house was able to arrange another jeep and the added benefit was that we had the dunes to ourselves! No hordes of other people getting in our pictures!







After the white dunes - very impressive, we headed to the red dunes nearer to Mui Ne. The done thing here is to sand toboggan. So we did! A local lady trying to rent us the sand 'boards' showed us the best slope and gave us a starting push! Very fun although I was finding sand in all sorts of places after!

Cat having a go!


Our lady making her way back off the red dunes.

We stopped in the fishing village on the way back into town - lots of coracle boats - the traditional round almost like bathtubs with one oar to propel them. They can move surprisingly fast! 




Local fisherman had brought the catch in when we got there - lots of yummy fish, crabs, squid and shellfish - in fact the waters edge was littered with shells.

Next stop was the fairy stream - you wade up through the shallow stream and admire the rock formations - they reminded Cat of Cappadocia - just on a smaller scale. 



That completed our excursion around Mui Ne - that afternoon we were off to cool down in the mountains in Da Lat, where Vietnamese wine comes from!

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