On the road again! Too be honest, none of us were going to miss Dalat too much. Our car picked us up at 10 and we spent the next 3 hours winding our way east out of the highlands to the coastal city of Nha Trang. For the first half hour or so, we passed endless rows of greenhouses. There were tens of thousands of them - where you would expect to see farms and fields, you would see white covered greenhouses stacked tightly together for miles and miles. We couldn't figure out if this was just to keep pests out, or something to do with rain. Breadbasket of Vietnam indeed!
The next couple of hours featured endless switchbacks as we were into the real mountains and making our way down slowly. It would have been awesome on a bike - and we did see a few bicycle tours. The roads were in great condition, and compared to the road from Saigon, this road was not very busy. There were some awesome views to be had - streams that fell down the steep cliff face and dropped hundreds of meters, soaring limestone cliffs, huge jungle covered valleys - quite beautiful. It's hard to imagine that this area would have been heavily bombed and scarred during the American war.
With about a half hour to go, we finally made it to flatter ground, where we were comforted to see our beloved emerald green rice paddies. Rice is life!
We were dropped off at our our hotels (one at each end of the strip), and we grabbed a quick bite and headed out for a walk.
The coastline here is beautiful. Similar to what we'd seen in Danang and Hoi An - never ending beach front with clear easy going ocean waves.
We walked to the other end of the main strip of Nha Trang. This is a fairly built up city (I would guess fourth biggest after Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi and Danang) and the waterfront is filled with international name brand high end hotels. There is also Russian advertising and writing everywhere! I guess this is a very popular place with Russians, as is Pukhet in Thailand according to Kylie. It's kind of weird to see Cryllic writing everywhere, but.... Why not?
We made it to the Mudford's hotel and the girls had a swim in the little pool on top of their hotel.
We then opted to head to the beach where the girls could do some body surfing while we enjoyed some local Belgian whites! There's a huge range of prices here - very local and cheap to very pricey and chic. We stayed in the south end and went to a small local place for dinner which was pretty good. I still enjoyed the food more in the north - it seemed healthier, fresher and more varied than in the south so far. I know I'm going on a relatively small sample of meals to base that on, but Beth agreed so now it's irrefutable!
After dinner, we all figured it was a good night to get to bed early as we had a full day surprise for the girls tomorrow(!). We did check out the tourist strips near the Mudford's place - I'm not sure why, but I was a little surprised at how happening the place was. There were a ton of neon lights, jazzy restaurants and clubs, ethnic foods like Indian, Armenian and Turkish to get the mouth watering even though we'd just eaten, and a boatload of people. There were lots of Russians too! Tomorrow, we have an early start. We are looking forward to it and not - the girls will have a great time tomorrow, but it's our last day with Kylie, Andrew, Ashlee and Sophie - they've been great company and fun to be around. We will have to list our new Tasmanian phrase book entries one of these blogs...
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