The Last of the Beaches

Ian and I left our last beach location today. Let's see, we have been to Diu, Goa, and Varkala in India. Koh Samui, Koh Tao, Koh Phagnan, and Railay in Thailand, then Mui Ne Beach in Vietnam. You may be thinking that we have spent an inordinate time at beach places, but can you really ever have too much? Especially since it's 19 degrees in Boston, where we are headed on December 19th.

Mui Ne was a spectacular beach. I'm glad we didn't take the advice of a Australian-Norwegian couple we met on a bus. They live in the Mekong Delta and said that Mui Ne stunk. Stubbornly, we headed there anyway. Like Railay in Thailand, it has large sporting activities - kite-boarding and wind-surfing, neither of which Ian or I tried.

Our foray into the giant surf was to rent a divorce-boat (two person kayak). We have done this a few times before without incident. Unbeknowest to us, this particular kayak had a leak that let in water when it was turned over. We would be kayaking on an extremely wavy and windy beach, swimming in which made me nervous. We were paddling happily near the breaking surf when we had our first dump. Ian righted the kayak and we hopped in, prepared for such an event. In the next 5 minutes, we fell over 2 more times until we realized the kayak was sinking. We decided that Ian would kayak back to shore. He suggested that I swim back to shore, about 200 meters in very heavy surf. Instead, I held on to the back until 10 meters from the shore and swam hard the rest of the way. No papers served.

The rest of the three days we spent on the beach, at the pool, and checking out the local attractions. Due to the geography of the area, the beach gets very high winds daily and is relatively dry. We visited a stretch of picturesque sand dunes. Similar to India, it is difficult to visit any attractions without various people following you around try to peddle something. It looked like every tourist was on some desert expedition. Two kids followed us for about 20 minutes asking us if we wanted to rent a sled to slide down the dunes. Not quite sledding on snow, but it was fun nonetheless.

I highly recommend Mui Ne beach to anyone visiting Vietnam. The long, clean, and white stretch of sand is not overdeveloped. There are excellent Vietnamese and international restaurants. We went to an Italian one that we recognized by Slow Food International. There are many activities around the area if you get bored of baking in the sun. The Vietnamese people are surprisingly and extremely friendly. Most of all, unlike Thailand, there was no trance music or hookers.

- Nisha