Day 275: Well named

After a buffet breakfast downstairs in the hotel, we checked out and then hopped into a taxi to the little beach-side village of Bai Xep. The cab driver first took us to what we think might have been the adjacent beach, but when we explained that we were staying at a place called the Haven, he backed up and drove us a bit further along – and then dropped us beside the main road, clearly still quite a long way from the beach and our hotel. We wondered why he didn't take us further down, but it all became clear when we walked down the hill and into the village. What looked like a road down quickly turned into a narrow path that twisted and turned through the heart of the village. The path gave us a pretty intimate view into the open houses and little shops that lined the route. We passed people dozing in hammocks and beds, people watching television on the floor and people staring curiously at the ot, sweaty white folks struggling under their heavy backpacks.

Eventually, we reached the end of the path; the beach and bay ahead of us down some stairs. To the left was a white gate and through it was our destination. Passing through the gate we found just what the name suggested – a cosy little haven with an open-plan communal dining and reading area, a library and some sun loungers arranged under some coconut palms. We were greeted by Chris from Mittagong (in the Southern Highlands in New South Wales – a place where I spent many a happy childhood winter staying on a friends' mixed cattle and sheep farm in a draughty one-room shearer's shack with an outside toilet) and his friend Alex from Wollongong, the Haven's owner. We checked in and Chris showed us upstairs to our room – a pretty basic affair with a double bed and a double mattress on the floor for the girls.

We quickly changed into our swimming costumes and hot-footed it (literally – the sand was scorching) down to the beach for a swim. Bai Xep is a fishing village located on a small and very quiet bay. Numerous brightly coloured fishing boats bob out in the water clear, refreshingly cool water of the bay, and the beach is relatively clear of litter. For lunch, we ate next door at Big Tree backpackers, Alex's new venture, and then just lazed around for a while reading our books/Kindles – the girls lazing properly in a couple of hammocks. 

 

After a while, we roused ourselves to take a little walk into the village. When we first arrived in Bai Xep, we had been so focused on getting to the hotel that we didn't pay too much attention to our surroundings. But when we walked back out, we discovered, at the centre of the village, a well, from which sprouted a series of pumps connected to pipes connected to the various houses in the village. Sitting around the well were a few women with an array of fresh(ish) fruit and vegetables arrayed in front of them, and we found a few bits and pieces to buy from them.

Later in the afternoon, we went for another swim a bit further around the bay and then grabbed a big empty sack that had been washed up on the beach and filled it with litter on the walk back. Back at the Haven, the girls played with Skippy the half-tailed cat (many of the cats in Southeast Asia have a mutation that causes their tails to be curtailed, often ending with an odd little twist or kink), a little puppy called Pippa, adopted from a local family across the way, and two Australian kids, India and Dion. These last two belonged to an extended family who have been travelling through Cambodia and Vietnam for some time - Paul and Christine, their daughter, Kylie, her boyfriend Steve and her two kids – and who stayed at the Haven for our whole time there. We ate dinner at Big Tree and then stayed up late talking to Brits Lucy and Sam, who have been riding around Vietnam for some time on a hired motorbike. 

Day 274: Another day, another beach town

This morning we had breakfast across the road again (supplementing our eggs and bread with the first of our anti-malarials – we'll be getting into the Mekong Delta soon) and then checked out. Kate and the girls had managed to bond with the woman who runs the hotel with her husband – she was often in the lobby with her daughter when we came and went – and before we left, she gave us all hugs.

We got a taxi to the train station, which was very small and rather crowded. We managed to score some seats beside an air conditioner, however, which made it all quite a bit more bearable. Kate then headed out to see if she could get some food for lunch, eventually returning with some pork (roast and barbecued), mangoes, lychees and chocolate cake. The train arrived at 11.40am and we all trekked out onto the tracks in search of our carriage. This was the train from Hanoi – it would eventually travel all the way down to Ho Chi Minh City – and it showed. There was quite a bit of litter in the carriage, which was very old and tired and incredibly hot and stuffy (although its age did lend it a certain charm). We sat in the station for some time, the air still and stifling – I didn't dare move lest my body erupt all over in a torrent of sweat. Thankfully, when we got under way, the air conditioning turned on and the journey was reasonably comfortable.

We arrived in the little town of Dieu Tri at 5.30pm and quickly hired a metered taxi to take us to our hotel in Quy Nhon. From what we could see from the taxi, Dieu Tri was pretty basic, so we were a little taken aback by Quy Nhon, which was a bright, shiny, bustling beach town, full of neon and parks and manicured municipal flower displays and beach-front play areas. Our hotel was right at the far end of town, a block or two back from the beach and our room was up on the seventh floor, which was reached via an external glass elevator whose air conditioning had broken, making it feel like we were inside a moving greenhouse.

After dumping our bags in our impressively large room (well, suite, really), we headed down to the beach front in search of some dinner. We found a cool roadside seafood barbecue restaurant with a very friendly waiter, so we sat down and ordered some beers and soft drinks. Kate and I then went up to the business end of the restaurant to see if we could order. After much confusion, we eventually figured out that the barbecue was finished for the night. We had had our hearts set on some grilled seafood, so when the waiter indicated that there was another place down the road, we paid for the drinks and headed that way. It soon became obvious, however, that there wasn't any such barbecue down this way, so we looped back around a large park, from which large numbers of large rats kept emerging onto the pavement ahead of and behind us – and ended up at a restaurant next to where we had just been – but in the other direction. This place did have some barbecues – metal grills over little charcoal braziers – and we had a pretty good meal of grilled prawns and beef ribs while the noisy celebration of a little boy's eighth birthday took place at the adjacent table.

Day 273: Hangin' out in Da Nang

It was particularly hot today, so after breakfast at our little place across the road we just hung around the hotel, went for lunch at the Indian across the road and then hung around the hotel some more. At about 3pm, the cleaners knocked on the door, so we finally mobilised ourselves and went down to the beach for a swim. Interestingly, this was the first time that we saw significant numbers of locals in the sea (which was, again, very calm). At about 6pm, we went out for dinner at our usual place. This is our last night in Da Nang, so the girls gave the old woman at the restaurant a loom-band bracelet, much to her evident delight (we saw her later showing it off to some of the other diners).

One of Da Nang's claims to fame is its dragon bridge – an impressive 666-metre-long structure that crosses the Han River and was opened to traffic in 2013. At night, the bridge lights up in constantly changing colours and on the weekends, it breathes fire and sprays water. We had read that the show takes place at 9pm and as we could see the bridge from the apartment, we set the alarm and crowded around the window when it went off. Of course, nothing happened, so we figured that we'd got the details wrong and drifted back to what we had been doing before the alarm went off. A little later I went and had another look and saw water jets spraying out of the dragon's mouth – sadly we never got to see the fire.

Day 272: Breakfast trek

Kate set out early this morning to walk across town to the train station in the hope of organising our tickets from Quy Nhon – our next destination - to Ho Chi Minh City. In the meantime, I took the girls out to see if we could find somewhere to get breakfast. We struggled a little – all of the cafes we found seemed to only serve drinks – but eventually we spotted a little place not too far from the hotel that had some eggs and bread rolls on display. With some pointing and holding up of fingers I ordered two rolls and four fried eggs, which came accompanied with glasses of a cold yellow liquid that tasted like Weetbix. The girls then did some school work while we awaited Kate's return, which didn't take too long. And she arrived bearing all of the necessary tickets and some tasty little cakes, so all was well.

When it was time for lunch, we went back to the Indian restaurant across the road and then back to the beach. The water was even warmer today and there were fewer waves, but we managed to refresh ourselves. We didn't stay in for long - Kate and I are very itchy and were wary of getting stung again by whatever got us yesterday. 

In the evening we went back to our barbecue restaurant for dinner. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the drinks order and Zoe got rather grumpy. As she sat in her little seat quietly fuming, a rather stern-looking old lady tried valiantly to cheer her up, her face set in something close to a scowl but with a pronounced twinkle in her eye. We couldn't help noticing as we ate the locals' method of dealing with their dinner detritus. Bottle tops, used serviettes, empty beer cans, clam shells were all simply dropped at their feet, so that the end of a decent meal for a large family resulted in the ground beneath the table looking like a particularly well-used landfill site. 

Day 271: From Ang Bang to Da Nang

In the morning, we finished packing our bags, checked out of our room, left our bags at reception and rode into Hoi An. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the shop under the rooftop restaurant at which we ate sold movie paraphernalia. This included some really nice 're-imagined' movie posters – cool, 1950s-pulp-fiction-inflected versions of posters for modern movies - printed on rice paper. I was keen to buy a couple, and spent some time flicking through the extensive selection picking out everything I liked the look of. I managed to whittle that down to five – plus one more each for the girls – and we then rode to find the post office, where we packaged them up and sent them back to Australia.

We then returned to the homestay (via an unplanned detour after we missed a turn and a pit stop to buy some lychees for breakfast). Our transport was waiting for us when we got back, so we loaded up our bags and set off on the 45-minute journey to tonight's accommodation – the rather bizarrely named Red Rosemallow Hotel in Da Nang, where Kate had booked us an apartment. Da Nang is the largest city in central Vietnam and an important port. It doesn't get a lot of Western tourists as they tend to head straight for Hoi An, which is located a bit further down the coast. Ang Bang Beach, where we swam and ate dinner yesterday, is essentially a continuation of the beach adjacent to Da Nang and we could see the city from across the bay when we swam there.

When we arrived, our apartment wasn't ready yet, so we crossed the road out front and had lunch at a little Indian restaurant, which made a nice change from all of the noodles and stir-fries we had been eating for the past month or more. We then walked down to the beach for a swim. It was really hot – 35C+ under a cloudless sky - and the sand was scalding, so we ran quickly across to a roped-off area that was evidently the 'patrolled' section. When we got in the water, we found that the seafloor had an incredibly shallow gradient, such that by 100 metres or so out, the water - which was almost unpleasantly warm - was still only up to my knees. We had to go such a long way out to actually immerse ourselves that we were a bit nervous about the stuff we had left back on the beach – if someone had wanted to steal it there wasn't a lot we could have done about it. After a while, we were joined by two young couples, one white, the other Vietnamese. I noticed that the two women were holding hands the whole time and eventually realised that it was because the Vietnamese couldn't swim (which is pretty common here – quite a lot of Vietnamese people drown at the beach each year because they can't swim), and the girl was particularly nervous about being so far out. After we had been swimming for a while, Sarah and Zoe started to complain about being stung by something and Kate and I started to feel a few tingles, too, so we all got out and headed back to the apartment.

Towards sunset, we headed out to see if we could find somewhere to eat. It was then that we discovered that our hotel is kinda out in the 'burbs. Although there are shops, hotels and restaurants along our road and towards the beach, if you head away from the beach and towards the centre of Da Nang, it gets pretty quiet. Where there are gaps between the buildings, they have often been turned into little market gardens with a falling-down hovel attached and a few chickens scratching about – a little slice of village life in the city. This was the direction in which we headed, passing the odd little restaurant or cafe here and there. There was also a bit of construction going on – as there is in most parts of Vietnam – and we passed a guy about to cut through a big pile of rebar with some sort of circular saw. He was literally in the process of bringing the saw down onto the metal as we approached him, but thankfully he paused as we passed – when I turned back and looked, he started cutting, unleashing an enormous spray of glowing metal sparks right where we had just walked.

We eventually reached a t-junction – should we turn left or right? As always, we were on the lookout for smoke from a barbecue, and after turning right, we spotted some straight away – on the next corner there was a guy cooking seafood on a big charcoal grill, adjacent to a big, mostly open-air restaurant. We walked over and found big tubs filled with water and live sea creatures of a variety of types, from snails to crabs to fish. Thankfully, there was a young woman who spoke pretty good English and she explained to Kate how it all worked and what it all cost. Kate then walked around sticky-beaking at what everyone was eating, placed our order and we were soon sitting at a miniature table on some miniature chairs tucking into some squid, prawns and fish. 

One of the cardinal rules of developing-world travel has always been: 'Don't have ice in your drinks'. And certainly, when we travelled around Central America back in 1992, the times I was sickest were when I stupidly broke that rule. But at this restaurant, that rule just had to go out the window. The kitchen facilities, such as they were, didn't run to a fridge, so the beers and soft drinks were warm. They're served to you with a glass mug and an ice bucket - you simply place a large piece of ice in the mug and pour the beer over. So, if you want a cold beer, and of course, given the weather, we did, ice is your only option. The good news is that as far as we can gather, across much of Southeast Asia, the ice production has been cleaned up and we've been taking it for granted that the ice in our drinks will be safe. And so far, that seems to have the case. We're still wary of salad, mind. 

As we ate, I realised that this was what I had been missing so far in Vietnam. We were the only Westerners there – and clearly a distinctly odd sight to the locals, judging by the open stares we received – but we were welcomed in and accepted and were able to just get on and do what the locals do (although I don't think we'll go quite so far as to turn up for dinner in our pyjamas).