Mui Ne

No sooner had the fireworks fizzled out and old aquaintances been forgotten, it was time to move on – poor old Matt and Adele had just got into the stride of life in Saigon and we were putting them on a 8am 4 hour bus ride north to the beach town of Mui Ne… was the fanciest bus we could get though. Arrived in town and headed to our extremely overpriced little ‘beach’ bungalows (prices double over TET!!)… I say ‘beach’ as this constituted a strip of sand, about 10ft below the walled gardens of the place we were staying, that was about a foot wide (in between waves crashing) when the tide was out!! Was still very nice though. Later that evening we sat and watched the sunset with a beer and some free rice wine to celebrate new year with a local beach shack owner and his wife further along the beach (where there actually was a beach!).
Having braved and mastered crossing roads in Saigon, sounds silly but it becomes an art! You can’t wait to cross the road, you’d be there all day, you have to just walk out, very slowly mind but just walk out into the road and allow the traffic to dodge you. So next thing for our soon not to be friends was to get them on mopeds, they will hate us by the end of this holiday! After a quick bit of instruction, get us such experts, we all pulled out from our little resort being carefully watched by the bike owners (it does seem that you just rent peoples actual bikes and they walk home!) and headed off along the coast road – about 10 minutes later Matt’s ran out of petrol (gauges, speedo’s, lights etc don’t generally work – horns do though!) and as I stopped behind him the girls disappeared off into the distance! Petrol found, girls noticed we weren’t behind them anymore and about 20 minutes later we are off again. Visited a little fishing village then headed for some sand dunes just along the coast, hired 2 pieces of plastic to use as sandboards and trudged off in the heat of the day up the dunes. To say it was unsuccessful would be an understatement, found the steepest dune, sat on the board and promptly went nowhere – ok, give myself a little push, nope just sank into the sand a bit and was definitly not going anywhere now – that was a waste of time! Back on the bikes and out further along the coast, stopped for lunch and our friendly waiter decided we should have 1kg of sea snails even though only Matt wanted them (he was trying to tell us in a give us a clue kinda way that they are an aphrodisiac!) – Matt nearly polished off the lot, Adele was in for a good night! Coming back my bike got a puncture but thankfully we were only 10 minutes from the nearest town so the girls went off to get help while me and Matt just stood at the road side being laughed at by helpful locals. The next day after a successful first outing we were all keen to go out again on the bikes, Matt getting a bit cocky now nearly drove straight into a ditch as he turned out of the hotel! Left the tourist area behind and headed down to the locals’ beach and checked out some old ruins and a temple before coming back to town and jumping in the sea to escape the heat. Mui Ne was all too relaxing and we don’t want people getting the idea that all we do is ride mopeds, lounge around beaches and drink beer each day so it was soon time to move on again.