Another Day in Nha Trang

I still had another 24-hours in Nha Trang and I didn’t know what else I was going to do. I had gone to the beach, but the water turned me off of that. I had gone to some temples, but didn’t know if there were more that I needed to see.

On the final night in Nha Trang, we were going to a group dinner. Before that, however, a friend and I decided to have a few drinks. (I’ve really developed a taste for Bia Ha Noi.) We stopped at this little spot on the street that runs parallel to the beach and had some drinks. As an appetizer, we had “Crispy Onions.” As you can probably guess, those turned out to be onion rings. In a little unexpected twist, though, the onion rings came out with soy sauce and chili sauce. As it turned out, the onion rings with chili sauce may have been the best onion rings I’ve ever had.

Later, we went out for a meal at a restaurant set up in somebody’s home. (I may be off a day here and there. We were in Nha Trang for three days and all of them really did run together.) Later on, there was some drinking at a disco-type bar, which was fun.

We had to get ready for another overnight train, the last of the trip, but we had most of the day in Nha Trang while we waited for that. As I said, I already was running out of things to do, but at least the weather was nice. I spent a lot of time people watching on the beach. I also went from café to café getting a little bit of food here and a little bit of coffee there, trying to fill up both my day and my stomach.

Sometime around five, we all got together and there was time to grab dinner before heading to the overnight train. As Nha Trang is a tourist town, most of the food places are Western or mixed Western/Vietnamese. Three or four doors down from our hotel was a Spanish tapas restaurant that a couple of the girls wanted to try. It sounded good enough for me, so I went over there too. We had a ton of stuff – Patatas Bravas, Tortilla Española, Jamon Serrano, etc. It brought me back briefly to my summer in Madrid. The food wasn’t as good as it was in Spain, but it was pretty good and did the job.

After dinner, we met back up with everybody to go to the train station for what would be my seventh and final overnight train ride in Southeast Asia. This one was only about eleven hours, so we weren’t expecting much trouble. I got on the train at around seven; read for a couple hours; took some Advil PM and slept from around 10 pm until the train folks woke us up a 6 am to tell everybody that we had reached Saigon. Yes, I know it’s official name is Ho Chi Minh City, but almost everybody here still calls it Saigon.

Anyway, getting off the train in Saigon is where I’ll pick up the next entry.