January 31, 2015 – Mui Ne Fairy Stream and Sand Dunes
Steve: We decided to get a look at some more of the local area, so we booked a one-day tour of the major attractions through our hotel. That gave us one of the most clapped-out jeeps I’ve ever ridden in, plus a driver guaranteed not to speak English, and off we went. First stop was the Fairy Stream, which is a little creek you can walk in for about a kilometre, along with 100 other tourists and a herd of milk cows. The fairies must have had the day off, but it IS a pretty interesting walk as the creek has undercut the sand banks, which are starting to hoodoo.
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This is not the fairy.
Not the fairy either.
Lucky fairy with a 4-leaf clover.
Then we drove north for half an hour to an area of white dunes, which were pretty impressive. We went for a walk up along one dune face for perhaps a kilometre until we got tired of sand blowing in our faces (that never shows up in the movies…), got the photo to prove we were there, and headed back to the snack shack. A couple of interesting things – first, there are lakes in between the dunes. Somehow that doesn’t fit with my internal picture of dunes, but there they are anyway. Second, the place was infested with young Koreans (that day), with half of them blasting around on hired quads and the other half standing and staring at their broken machines. I guess since this isn’t a repeat-customer business, they rent out junkers, refuse to refund the money when they break, drag them back down to the shop, and rent them out again. Good business model! I was very impressed that the young Korean women would run all the way back to the rental place for help while the young men stood around pretending to fix the bike….
On the dunes
Sand dunes & water. Weird.
What our drivers do while they wait.
Then we were off to the red dunes for the ‘Sunset Over The Dunes’ Thing. Good idea, except the wind blows sand in your face (see above), and it gets cold around sunset (I know, I know, but really it was!). The locals rent out little sheets of what looks like Formica you can use to toboggan down the dunes, which looks pretty interesting if the thought of mining sand out of your ass-crack for the next week appeals to you. The dunes are very pretty, and well worth visiting. Happily, sunset found us halfway back to beer at the hotel.
Sand-bogganing.
Steve waits patiently for sunset before deciding, ‘screw this, I’m cold, we can watch the sunset from the hotel where there is beer’.
Deb got the sunset pic anyway!
Deb: When we were not gallivanting around, we took to mini golf. I beat Steve! Na Na NaNa! This was not an easy course, and the darker it got, the harder it became as we had to go searching for some of the holes. There was a par 3 that should have been a par 20, and a par 7 that was all that and then some.
Head down. Wrist flat. Smooth tempo. Contact on the downstroke. What the f*&!((*!. It went over there! Again!
It’s time to head on now. We’re looking forward to going, but we’re sad to say goodbye to our friends at the hotel as well.
My favourite waiters, Thanh (l) and Heip (r).
Deb: When I first met Hiep and asked him his name, we got an honest-to-goodness, “golly gosh gee” reaction, and he even blushed. He asked me my name, and from then on, I was the only one he would greet each morning with a wave and a ‘good morning, Debbi’. I felt special.
Our last wave from the owner, Eric & his young manager, Yen (who we accidentally ran into in Dalat, but more about that in the Dalat blog.)
As we left, I got hugs from just about everyone who worked at that hotel, the chambermaids, the waiters, the security guards, and even our laundry lady & her family. I was quite emotional when I left, for they are all such wonderful people and really made me feel like I was part of their family. I took so many photos of the staff that when Yen downloaded them onto his computer, they ate up quite a bit of his memory. I wish I could post all the photos of the people, the boats, the scenery, the markets, etc, but you will just have to come visit to see them for yourself.
We did not get many photos of Phan Thiet. From what we saw of it on our way to the Mall and the liquor store, it looked pretty interesting, but every city has its interesting parts. We just did not spend much time there.