#4: Mui Ne

12.27 - 12.29

After the Delta, we got on an open-bus and headed 5 hours north east, to Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a pretty quiet beach/resort area with a lot of interesting natural phenomena to visit nearby. These have come about due to Mui Ne`s unique micro climate. Mui Ne has only half as much rain as surrounding areas, and it is home to giant sand dune fields that work some kind of climate control. Mui Ne is surrounded by fishing villages (above is a shot of traditional Vietnamese boats. I saw people fishing in them, carrying vegetable loads, etc. Seem to be multi-purpose boats). In Mui Ne, we spent our days doing several important activities:

1. Eating

As you may have guessed, much of our entire vacation was spent eating. But I feel we did remarkably well for ourselves in Mui Ne and Hue especially. We tucked in like there was no tomorrow. Mui Ne is also where we first really began to discover the joys of Vietnamese coffee. Coffee in VN is made through a tiny metal filter that sits atop your cup. The cup has about half an inch of sweetened condensed milk spooned into the bottom before the coffee starts brewing. Then, the very strong espresso drips out on top of the milk. The whole concoction is too strong for most westerners (or too sweet, if you make the mistake of stirring vigorously) so many westerners request a glass of hot water on the side, to dilute it. So delicious.

2. Chillin

Though we had one day of hardcore tourism in Mui Ne, mostly we were just chillin'. There were beaches, there were palm trees, there were motorbikes for some (Christina), and ice cream for others (Jenny). I got a midnight motorbike lesson from Chrissy but most of my bike riding occurred in Hue. I probably would have killed myself there if it hadnt been for this sole midnight lesson. The VN guy`s teaching method was `ok now get on! here is brake, here is gas, GO!` not much discussion of gear shifting or other important driving skills. Hm.

As I mentioned before, Mui Ne hosts some amazing giant dunes. There are two groups: the white dunes and the yellow dunes. We hired a private jeep and driver for a day, and got picked up at the unfortunate hour of 5.30am in order to arrive at the dunes to see the sunrise.

A little kid from the house nearby climbed the dunes with us, carrying some plastic sheets that would serve as our sand sleds. Sweeeeet, sand sledding on giant dunes. This was my favorite activity on the whole trip. The dunes were very steep and very high, and if you threw yourself down right, you could build up tremendous velocity flying down to crash in a puff of sand at the bottom. If you had good balance (as the little kid did) you could dune-surf, but this was above and beyond my abilities. I wish we could have sledded more! Though walking back up the giant dunes wasnt anything that anyone would describe as fun.

After that, we hiked a bit in the Red Canyon (it is very red, as you can see in the photo). The cow picture I took out the side of the jeep. We kept getting stopped by herds of cattle moseying down the highway. Our driver, Ty, does not look impressed in the glimpse you can catch of him in the side mirror. After the canyon we were supposed to hike to see a waterfall. The only way to get to the waterfall was by walking upstream in a shallow river for about 20 minutes through an interesting white/red rock terrain. The falls were thoroughly unimpressive, but the river-hike was neat. Last but not least, we drove up to the peak of the peninsula to visit the fishing villages (above). Hundreds of boats dotted the water and shore. It was nice to get away from the touristy resort area and see how the VN people lived their day to day lives. Below are some more shots of the fishing village.