Nha Trang / Visiting Daylyn and Nick

Much of our hurry upon entering Vietnam was to catch up with a friend of mine from highschool, Daylyn, and her husband, Nick. We finally settled on meeting up in Nha Trang, a sea side town a couple hundred kms from HCMC.

On getting to Nha Trang, we found that Daylyn was near death with a cold and after a quick breakfast she went back to bed to try to sleep it off a bit. This left Nick hanging out with us for the day and he did a good job showing us around. Nick and Daylyn had already been in Nha Trang for a bit too long waiting for us to arrive and had covered the city pretty thoroughly so Nick just showed us the highlights. These included a walk along the really nice public beach which seemed to cover the length of Nha Trang and a really amazing photographer's studio. After finishing the day of sightseeing we joined up with a more alive Daylyn and had a nice dinner.

The next day Nick and Daylyn had arranged for a boat tour of some of the islands around Nha Trang. The tour was excellent; we had a good guide, nice and plenty of food and the islands were quiet lovely. The only downside was that it was quiet cold and at times rainy. This was a pretty big downside. The tour was meant to include snorkling near two of the islands and though Nick and I went in the water at the first island, we were too cold to get in again for the second. The snorkling was okay. Though visibility was quiet poor when you got close enough there were some colorful (with all colors tinted slightly brown by the murky water) fish and interesting looking (brown) coral.

Nick and Daylyn (in the middle) freezing while rain pelts the tarp behind them. Silver lining? Look at all the food we had for lunch!

The last event of the tour was visiting a fish farm/fishing village. When we first arrived our boat docked to a little platform with several sets of underwater nets which contained a variety of kinds of fish, lobsters, and squid type things. We had the option to row around these ridiculous round basket boats so Meg and I set off trying to paddle this thing towards other floating platforms which I hoped would contain equally exotic things. The round bottom boats are not particularly maneuvarable so I did not get far before we were called back to our boat. I had just enough time to see that no other platforms seemed to have anything in their nets (maybe one was set up just for us tourists) and also to run into a bunch of stuff since I couldn't really stop or turn effectively.

Meg and I and our chaperone looking pretty professional in our basket boat (picture from Nick).

Me, struggling to prevent us from smashing into someones house boat.

After getting back to shore and having warm showers Daylyn and Nick hopped on a night bus to Hoi An and we got ready for the next leg of our trip into the central highlands. The visit had been too short but it had been fun to see friends so far from home.