January 15, 2015 – in and around mui ne.
So, here we are in Mui Ne (pronounced Moo Nay), a very pretty strip of hotels and restaurants along one of the better beaches in southern Vietnam. I can’t call this a beach community, as there isn’t one. Community, that is, the beach is definitely there! The town of Mui Ne is at the north end, and the city of Phan Thiet is at the south end, and we tourists all hang out in the strip in between. Today, that’s Deb and me, and about 50% of western Russia. This place is at least 80% Russian, and the Phan Thiet newspaper refers to it as ‘Little Moscow’. We liked it enough to extend our hotel stay for an extra three weeks, so we’re here for 24 days. About 90% of this place is one street, which holds all the hotels, restaurants, and shops. There are lots of palm trees, and once you set your personal filter to screen out the taxi and moto drivers and the restaurant touts, it’s very nice. 28-31 degrees during the day, but in the afternoon, there’s always a brisk wind to make things feel cooler. In the evening, it plummets all the way down to 23-24, so sitting out in the evening is very pleasant.
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A peanut vendor dressed for the morning cold (25 degrees).
Our hotel is about 300 metres up one of the very few side streets (about ten feet wide) and sits on a series of dunes, giving us an excellent panorama of the town and the ocean, and at night we can see the lights of the squid fleet filling the horizon. Very romantic if you’re not a squid. We have a pleasant room on the second floor overlooking a small pool, and there’s a big pool at the excellent restaurant, which we can use as well. Not bad for $22.50 USD/night! And the restaurant has REAL COFFEE, and we get refills.
Our little pool. We’re on the second floor looking down.
The restaurant and main pool from the upper terrace.
Deb: When we arrived, I was really sick with food poisoning from the hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, so I was pretty much out of it. When we discovered we were not given back our passports from ‘that’ hotel in HCMC, our hotel receptionist immediately said, ‘No problem, we will get them for you.’ You can’t imagine the relief we felt. That was the beginning of a relationship with the staff that became very endearing, and we were treated like family. We originally booked for 3 nights, but we liked the place so much that we extended our stay for another three weeks.
We have the local bus sorted out now, so it’s time to go for a look-see at Mui Ne town. The single most striking thing about the town is the fishing fleet. There is a humongous pile of boats anchored just offshore, and they use little round plastic caracols with inboard motors to get back and forth to shore and to haul their nets in and out. Other than that, it’s a very forgettable little town.
A very small part of the Mui Ne fishing fleet.
A side street in Mui Ne. Motorbike good, car bad.
Deb: The market in Mui Ne was your typical fishermen’s village market. They sell the meat & fish in the back, the vegetables, food & ‘restaurants’ in the middle, and everything else as you first walk in.
These pancakes have scallions, squid, and shaved potato in the middle. Very tasty indeed!
Phan Thiet is completely different, though. The only thing in common is the big fleet of fishing boats, which they keep in a river. It is a fair-sized city (about 200,000) and has shopping centres, movie theaters, and such. We wore our feet off walking, as usual. And we found a tiny little liquor store that sells decent Chilean wine in a box for a good price. Yippee!
Fishers and their round things that pass for dinghies in Phan Thiet. These people don’t know whether they’re coming or going….
The restaurants in Vietnam will cook up anything & everything. While we ‘westerners’ may not approve of some of the items, here it is just natural. I tried Alligator. The belly meat is more tender than the tail, which is quite chewy, but it’s just meat. It’s very lean, and I guess the taste is somewhere between chicken and rabbit.
This is not a chicken or a rabbit.
Here are a few interesting doors in our neighbourhood.
Elephant Doorway: This place did not have the bricks in place for a door when we arrived. We got to watch the whole transformation from no brick walls to the completion of lock-up.
This door has an additional safety lock of Cactus.
Kite surfing/boarding and surfing are the #1 sports here, and they hold international competitions usually in November. The wind comes up around 11 each morning, and you get blown around pretty good. The surf was too rough for us to go in, and we watched as people who were trying to take selfies and photos of others got knocked down, and they were only in water up to their knees. It was quite entertaining at times. I only saw one shop selling boogie boards and one person using one…which I found strange until I saw how rough the surf was. If you were not paying attention, you could be slam-dunked in the blink of an eye.
A typical mid-afternoon, with the sky full of kites.
Taking off from the beach. These folks really get moving.
This monkey has a guy working for him selling ice cream. Doesn’t want to be recognized – probably not declaring his income.