Day 1 - Nha Trang Vietnam
We took advantage of the long holiday between Jan 31 which fell on a Thursday and Feb 4 which ended on Sunday to travel to NT, Vietnam.
Why NT? It is a much touted destination on Trip Advisor. I read this article about a Malaysian family who went there and recommended it as a family travel destination. Why not? It is near, it is affordable and sounds interesting as it offers land attraction, sea attraction and mountain attraction!
Day 1- We landed at about 3 pm at Cam Rahn airport NT. We bought the local sim card and used it to call Grab. The driver came immediately and charged us 350k to take us to the Summer Hotel which was about one hour ride from the airport. Unfortunately for him he forgot the back cover of his luggage seat which he removed in order to put our luggage. We tried to help him find it as he circled back to the airport but it was gone in a matter of minutes!
He gave up looking and drove us to The Summer Hotel was a bit old-fashioned but located smack in the city. We checked into 2 old-fashioned rooms with creaking but comfortable beds. Otherwise the room was clean and comfortable and we had good sleep for all the nights we were there.
Price for the stay included daily breakfast at M floor which had a Western, Russian and Chinese venue. The only thing that was rather disappointing was that the siew yoke and the dumpling was hard. I had to dip the dumpling into the pho soup to soften it otherwise it was not edible. Come to think of it most of the siew yoke sold everywhere was hard not like our siew yoke at home. I was thinking of how nice was our Malaysian food back home and the incredible variety we had.....traveling makes me love Malaysia more!
Total for the 5 day stay was about 10 million dong. A 100k dong is about RM17 so you can do the maths! For 4 of us that amounted to about RM240 per room per night (estimate only).
After checking in we then crossed the road to eat some Vietnamese spring roll, drank coconut water and had some Vietnamese noodles. There were so many restaurants along the road....we were spoilt for choice. However the name of the restaurant where we had lunch was unpronounceable so I really cannot put it here but the food was delicious.
We then bought tickets to a place where we could do a mud-bath i.e. bathed in mud! They had quaint egg-shaped containers filled with mud where 2 people can chill out. They also had larger pools of clean mud water where a family of 5 or more could soak. We bought a package which included a herbal bath after the mud-bath. The mud-bath was about 20 mins where we could soak ourselves in mud up to our necks. It was different. I kept thinking of teh tarik when looking at the color of the mud! The mud was clean and smooth. After each group left the mud pool, the old mud was drained out and the pool cleaned so it was very hygenic!
We then walked through pebbled paths to soak ourselves in a herbal bath. The herbs was citronella leaves! So fragrant.
A taxi ride took us to a place called the Dream Show. Here we watched an hour plus of Vietnamese dancing and singing. The girls and guys were dressed in Vietnamese traditional clothes! Sam liked it so much that he went back to see it again on Sat night (on his own)! He said the Sat show was different from the Wed show.
After the show, we crossed the road to a rooftop restaurant for some grill meat. We opted to have Western food aka meat platter. It was not enough for all of us so we ordered some chicken wings which turned out to be super yummy.
It was cold as we sat the rooftop and ordered a platter of meat such as shrimps, cuttlefish, fish and chicken. A lot of Westerners were there too but they were kind of drunk.
One thing we had to get used too was the number of foreigners in NT especially Russians! Yes, everywhere the shops had Russian names and even the mini marts sold Russian stuff. Restaurants were opened by Russians too!
We met a couple from Siberia who told us they travelled 22 hours from their town to take the flight to Hong Kong and transited from Hong Kong to NT for another 9 hours. They told us that it was bitter cold in Siberia at -30 degrees! We met them on Friday when we were going up to Vinpearl Land on the cable car.
No wonder the Russians found NT a delightful holiday destination willing to travel such a long time to reach the place. At The Summer Hotel, some of the breakfast food was Russian and next door to us Russian tour guides came to meet with guests to explain the various tours that were available.
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