VIETNAM: Nha Trang (July 21st - 23rd)

Our sleeper train arrived in Nha Trang early in the morning.  Our hotel rooms weren't going to be ready for awhile so dropped off our luggage and everyone scattered around the city to find breakfast.  Em and I were really starting to crave western food so we walked for a ways until we found a place that made pancakes and eggs benedict....and they were goooooood!

Nha Trang was another beach stop on our journey, located on the southwest coast of Vietnam on the South China Sea.  But, unlike all our other beach stops where they were more like small, laid back beach towns, Nha Trang is a big hustling and bustling city thats built right up to the beachfront.  Kinda had a Miami feel to it.

Our guide William had a local Aussie friend whose Vietnamese wife, Fong, took us to a beach outside the city for the day.  It wasn't a quiet, secluded beach like some of the others we had been to, but still a lot of fun.  Fong had a huge bucket of ice and loads of drinks ready to go, then spent the day grilling seafood and kabobs, making rice and noodles, and keeping us fed as long as we were hungry.  We mingled with the locals a lot more here.  Some high school aged kids had never played with a frisbee so they had a blast with us out in the water, and later we played some beach volleyball with some other locals nearby (volleyball is insanely popular in Vietnam).  We're starting to sound like a broken record......but it was another great beach day.

The next day was a blast.  We took a gondola/cable car to a huge island called Vinpearl.  It's a famous vacation spot for Vietnamese people, kinda like a smaller, Asian version of Disneyland or Seaworld.  There is an amusement park, aquarium, dolphin show....all that kind of stuff.  But the best part was the water park.  You have to remember, this is Southeast Asia....things like saftey codes and building regulations  don't really apply plus the rides are ready made for the Vietnamese not us huge americans.  So believe me when I say these were some of the fastest and scariest water slides we have ever been on.  They were insane!  On each slide it was almost guaranteed that you'd get to a point where you really started to question if you were gonna make it down without serious injury at best.....not to mention your own life.  We were actually physically sore that night and the next day......but what a rush!  We would have stayed all day, but we had to head back to the hotel, shower up, grab a quick bite to eat, and head to the train station to catch another overnight train.  Oh the life of the weary traveler.....

 The main beach in Nha Trang

 The local beach we went to with Fong

A small taste of SoCal

Cabel car to Vinpearl and the waterpark on crack

 View of Nha Trang from the cable car

 The white letters on the side of the hill say Vinpearl ( very hollywood style)

 Again, we would have loved to have had an waterproof camera.  Here are some pics we grabbed from the web of some of the waterslides we rode.

The spaceship looking slide we referred to as the toilet... when you slid down to the bottom it shot you out into the massive spaceship portion and swirled you around like a toilet bowl before dumping you out of the bottom... it was so crazy.

Jon rode the green slide.... I was not about to ride either :)

Another one Jon rode and i veiwed from the bottom.