Vietnam- Mar. 2, 2011

Day #12, on to Long Hai

3.4.11

After our normal breakfast I called our local travel agent Tony to see what he had in store for us today. Well, he had his private car and a driver ready to take us for the 6 hour drive to Long Hai for $100. We said, YES. Having a ride the whole way would get us there much quicker avoiding a transfer from bus to find a taxi that would take us to Long Hai from Phan Thiet. We left Phan Rang with Hoa as our driver and off we went down the road at about 8:30am. Tony had Hoa take us to see Mui Ne on the way. It was a beautiful place scenery wise, but there was so much garbage on the beach we were amazed. In fact we have noticed quite a bit of garbage, mainly small plastic bags, on the roadsides and beaches. We saw this in Costa Rica years ago, then they started the eco movement there and now Costa Rica is totally different, mostly cleaned up. We hear the word eco here from time to time too, so we are hoping that it will only be a matter of time before the people of Vietnam get serious about not littering. Some of the hotels keep their own beaches clean, that is nice. We arrived at our hotel "Anoasis" at about 2:30 pm and went straight to our cottage bungalow, it is a really cute place, large with plenty of room to spread out, (see picture below), then we had a much needed lunch. The food was really good! I had a Thai soup, my favorite, Tom Yum Kum, it was excellent, the best I've ever tasted, maybe because we are so close to Thailand. After lunch we went for a nice walk on the beach. It is a really nice beach here, one side has nice sand the other direction eventually turns into rocky tidepools. We went down and watched some of the locals clean their nets, what a daily job!!! When we arrived in Long Hai the weather was a bit overcast, coolish and breezy, but as the day has turned into late afternoon, it is still overcast, but now somewhat muggy. Later on we went down to the restaurant, perched on a rocky ledge overlooking the ocean and had a light dinner. One thing I had was sauteed morning glory with garlic. I had been wanting to order it for several days now, it was really good, like a green. Anoasis is a very nice place but probably not worth the price we paid, it is getting a bit run down and not maintained as well as it could be. We are seeing this everywhere, part of the worldwide economic crunch. All in all it was a good day and a very nice place to be.

#8 Near Mui Ne- Oxen