Travel Journal

Nha Trang, on Vietnam’s south-central coast, is very touristy, and like most places in Vietnam, it has changed drastically over the past decade. It now has hundreds of hotels for the large number of Vietnamese and foreign tourists who want to spend some time in this pleasant city, and it seems that every week, construction starts on a new hotel, even more luxurious than the others.

I was excited to be back in this city, to meet some of the friends I had made during previous visits, and to see all of the now very familiar places, coffeeshops and restaurants again. The long beach is wonderful, and Nha Trang could almost be mistaken for a Mediterranean town, were it not for the many pictures and paintings of Ho Chi Minh, and slogans in Vietnamese like “Nha Trang Is The City Of Heroes", referring to the resistance during the American War.

In the evenings, young couples drive on scooters or motorbikes on the main boulevard along the beach, to see and be seen, and a special section of the beach is crowded after dark with parked motorbikes, where couples are kissing, as this, or even holding hands, is unheard of during the day.

From Nha Trang, I made a short excursion to Dalat. It is a cool mountain resort in the central highlands, and is a famous honeymooning resort for Vietnamese couples because of its climate and idyllic location. There is indeed some beautiful scenery to explore around Dalat, which I did on a rented motorbike, as I drove on winding roads through mountains covered with lush forests, visiting some large waterfalls a dozen kilometers away from the town.

Back in Nha Trang, I bought a ticket for a night bus to the small town of Hoi An. It is just south of the central Vietnamese city of Danang, and it is one of my favourite places in Vietnam. A Unesco World Heritage site, it is a very picturesque riverside town with narrow streets and old houses, many beautiful pagodas and Chinese temples with nice gardens. Some of the many wooden buildings date back to early 19th century. It is very touristy, but this doesn’t diminish the feeling you get, of being in an open-air museum of historical Vietnam, when you walk through Hoi An. The town is also famous for manufacturing clothes, and the hundreds of tailors can produce basically anything you want in 24 hours, including copies of your favourite shirts or trousers, in the material of your choosing.

After a couple of days, I travelled further north to Hue, located on either side of the wide Perfume River. Around Hue, there are a number of interesting pagodas and tombs of emperors to be explored. Close to the city, the Thien Mu pagoda is where monk Thich Quang Duc used to live. Although not famous by name, photographs of him were printed on the front pages of newspapers and magazines all around the world, as he burned himself to death in Saigon on 11 June 1963, in protest of the policies of the brutal South-Vietnamese Diem regime.

The old part of the city, on the north side of the river, is situated inside a moated citadel. It is here where the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City are located, home to the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty, until the end of World War II, when Emperor Bao Dai abdicated to Ho Chi Minh’s Provisional Revolutionary Government. Although much of the historical buildings and temples were destroyed during the American War, some of the residences, halls, palaces and gates have been restored, and are well worth a visit.

After visiting the Imperial Enclosure, I cycled around on a rented bicycle through the old city, and stopped near Tinh Tam Lake, where I enjoyed an absolutely delicious bun bo Hue, a local specialty, consisting of rice vermicelli and vegetables with beef soup. Another of my favourite dishes, sold everywhere in Vietnam, is pho bo, or beef noodle soup, to which you add some extra flavour by using the nuoc mam, or fish sauce, and of course chillies. What you’ll probably want to give a miss is the absolutely foul smelling mam nem, a different kind of fermented fish sauce and uniquely Vietnamese, it has the strongest stench I’ve ever encountered, worse than the already very unpleasant odour of the durian fruit. Both are, not unlike those British and Australian concoctions of condiments called Marmite and Vegemite, an acquired taste (to say the least).

After a couple of days in Hue, a long busride brought me to Hanoi, my last stop before I would go to China.