Floating bars and beach parties in Nha Trang
I have taken a lot of overnight buses on this trip, all of them pretty bad but this was up there. The bus was packed and the seats more designed for tiny Asians on a 3 hour trip rather than us lanky westerners on a 12 hour one. Combined with dodgy air con which meant I froze the whole night while Tash and Jeff were dying of the heat, and seats that didn’t recline…..so arrived to our beach paradise very tired and to see the grey skies and rain with the rising sun. But at least it didn’t make us feel bad about practically sleeping all day and watching our cable TV. We’ve been quite lucky with room in Vietnam all having hot water and TV for pretty cheap. So we watched a lot of trash but it was all good on a grey rainy day. Jeff and I went for a short walk for over priced ice cream and to check out the beach, which would be fantastic if it wasn’t so wet. Very different feel from our beach in Cambodia, no shared bungalows on the beach and campfires, this place was all developed with concrete hotels and shops. We did manage to leave our hotel room and get some food and buy ourselves some super cool Vietnamese rice paper hats. I love it how people here wear these hats all the time, its actually not just a stupid tourist thing, and they carry things on the balancing baskets over their shoulder, its great! So looking hot we had a few photos on the beach which turned out to be the only time we wore our hats, they’re not practical for traveling.
Back for an early night as we were all pretty exhausted still from the night before and we had signed up for a boat trip the next as day in hope that the weather would turn out.
The boat trips are the main tourist thing in Nha Trang, the original trips closed down because of the ‘party favours’ that were handed out, but there are now plenty of less illegal trips, all advertising themselves with floating bars, free alcohol and fun part times. Hmmm…could be horribly cheesy…..the boats all playing “let’s get the party started” when we got to the pier only added to our fears. But we decided to go with it and take the piss a bit. There were heaps of boats at the pier all offering essentially the same thing, when we were all on board we headed (slowly) across to the islands on our old wooden split level boats to the sounds of ‘hip, cool backpacker type music’ (Hotel California and Bob Marley)
“Are you guys ready to paaaaarrrrrty???”
oh dear…..we thought
“yyyeaaaahhhhh!!!’ we answered
“after lunch will be happy our where you have freeeeeeee wine and fruit!!!! Don’t be lazy or we will throw you over board!!!”
Turned it to be a pretty fun day, and for $6 with a massive seafood lunch, heaps of fruit and indeed free wine (more like vinegar) it was a great deal. We were even lucky enough to get sun for most of the day.
We stopped at a few different spots where we jumped off the boat for swimming and snorkeling and then we all grabbed our floating rings and hung out in the sea on a floating bar. The best part was the live band! The seats in the bottom folded into a table for lunch and they busted out drums, guitars and a guy in a coconut bikini with Marackers, we even got a song sheet with lyrics to an awesome song they had written about our fun boat trip. Then they got us all dancing on the table, it was hilarious, you really could only laugh as we got down with the coconut breasted man and the insane Japanese guys.
We were luckily to have really cool people on the trip which made it really fun. Our last stop was to an aqurium which was a bit bizarre then headed back to port where it seems most of the other boats had been drinking far too much as all the Australians were falling over themselves to find their right boat.
So great day for $6 and it got us in the partｙ mood so we headed out to check out the bars that all seem to offer free drinks. We ended up at the sailing club, the hippest place around. We ended up out until 3am dancing like idiots, so much so that a guy asked us if we were on ecstasy and had any he could buy.
After a long sleep-in we dragged ourselves out of bed and headed down to the airport where we were avoiding the 60 hour bus ride and flying to the capital Hanoi. Unfortunate that we don’t have enough time to check out the coast as it looks amazing but theres always next time, so it was a quick flight up to the cold north.
Tags: Travel, Vietnam
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