Live from Nha Trang – This is Sunday Night!
I stream this post from amongst the pimps, the rats and the whores. No, this isn’t a band lineup from the Seaview Tavern circa 1999, this is Nha Trang baby. A stretch of beach with only 3 things on it’s mind. Selling sex, selling cigarettes and selling sunglasses.
Sure, the beach is pretty, sure, the water is nice, sure there’s nothing in the water to sting or stab you like in Mui Ne – I interrupt this broadcast with a witty anecdote.
In Vietnam, you’ll see a lot of things, Cyclo drivers snatching cash from overweight middling age women, dudes with no legs, claiming to be ex ARVN soldiers selling postcards for 40x their natural price, Ray Bans for $3.00, but one recurring sight is the munted cat.
One such munted cat, with it’s munted tail and munted saunter was sauntering past this bench. Now the last thing it was expecting to see, sitting on this bench, was a dude, typing on a very quiet Netbook. In a very cat-like fashion, it saw me, widened its eyes like it was a Something Awful Photoshop Phriday mistake, and stopped dead, taking in this marvel, horrified at what might happen.
Of course, that’s where the story peaks because in typical cat like fashion, it disappointed me and just kept on sauntering. Back to the story.
Where was I? Right! My comparison between Nha Trang and Mui Ne. Well, Nha Trang trumps Mui Ne. At least there’s SOME city here, and something to do other than sleep with kitesurfers. Enough with that. Let’s get on to whining about buses.
Our bus trip from the awesome Dalat very, very slowly ballooned from 4.5 hours to 7 hours due to.. well, piss poor driving and too much dropping us at food halls and cliffside pay toilets along the way… every frigging hour.
We did the big walk today to the museums onto to learn that they’re closed on the weekend. We’ll classify that as MUSEUM FAIL shall we? So we decided to keep on walking to check out the train station to get a more realistic vibe of what a Vietnamese train actually looks like, which we’re still not sure as you couldn’t get in without a ticket or a team of guerrillas – both of which are about 250,000 VND.
We checked out some of the cool markets, and Nerissa scored herself another small present, soon to be mailed and I found myself a fairly innocuous t-shirt as I found out here, they’re extremely useful. Why I left a Ben Sherman polo at home is far beyond my comprehension.
Chris, got one more small pressie for you too. It cost me $1.00AUD which for the gag factor, is a ratio of 29:1 in favour of the present.
I should go before I get raped, seduced, mugged or these rats realise that they don’t need to be scared of cats, or me as they’re bigger than both of us.
Our next movements are as follows.
Catch the train to Da Nang and use Da Nang as a base to visit Hoi An and get suitted up for work in Hanoi. There’s a bit around Da Nang that we can see so we’ll rent a bike for a week and travel around and see what there is to see.
I’ll sort out some photos tomorrow to upload and bombard the flickr site again. Watch this space you cretins of youth, thirty somethings and booming babies. Till next time, keep it rubber side down.
Rose, put Sam’s balls DOWN.. you don’t know where thev’e been( or maybe you do)
It is reassuring to see that the Ben Sherman shirts etc are still gracing bedroom floors.
Not quite sure what to make of the cat reference? Big build up there Sam. Cat story phail!!!Do the cats there have bent tails? All the cats in Indo have a kinked tail, which at first makes you think they copped a passing scooter, but it is inbred.
Nice beach pics….only 7 1/2 weeks to Bali!!!
My op was cancelled at the 11th hour for an emergency. Going in on April 2 for a second try!
Love to you both. PS. Mooner is Swanbourne not Cottesloe.
Ma