Mui Ne

After one week of solid perspiration,we were looking forward to a few days of breezy, beach side r&r. It wasn’t to be found in Mui Ne. Turns out the only access to the limited, and frankly average, beach is through the more expensive hotels. All we got for our thirteen dowaar were a few concrete steps leading down into the sea. The nearest thing to a palm tree were a few old coconuts and palm fronds amongst the flotsam soup at the bottom of the seawall. We just pretended it was one big swimming pool. One that we never used. We hired a jeep for the day with Max, a real live German person, to take us around Mui Ne’s other natural wonders; the fairy spring, the sand dunes and something called The Red Canyon which was closed for ‘rennovation’. I can only assume it was being repainted, or it was finally getting the obligatory collection of fibre glass animals – the highest honour the Vietnamese can bestow on any area of outstanding natural beauty.

The fairy spring and sand dunes were, nevertheless, impressive and void of fibreglass creatures . We got professionally hustled by a ten year old into hiring sand sleds ‘for use on the dunes, you go many time you like mister’. Even on a 60 degree incline, the flimsy sheets of plastic did nothing but make us curse the little shit.

We did get some amazing photos though. None of which are on here as all it took were a few grains of sand to get into my camera and it died. Worse still, in a wholly selfish and pointless act, it wiped the memory card of all our photos from the last two weeks, leaving us with nothing but the limited, low resolution versions that I had already uploaded. Thus, the next day was spent doing it all over again with Kelly’s camera and our own scooter to at least claw back some memories. We got so sunburnt on the scooter that we had to stay an extra night. That place was just bad luck.