05 August: Nha Trang

A better train ride than the last one, by far. But after last year's many sleeper-train trips, I thought sleeping on trains would be far easier for me.

Because of our late departure last night, we ended up arriving later than we were supposed to (obviously) in Nha Trang. Not really a problem for us because we discovered that we couldn't check into our hotel room, at Prime Hotel, till 2pm anyway.

Travel Planning tip: We booked all our Vietnam and Cambodia accommodation thru Agoda and I would definitely use them again when planning my own overseas accommodation.

The staff here are the least friendly or helpful of anywhere we've been in Vietnam so far. Also, they speak the least English, so maybe that is why. We seem to have left the French behind and have traded them in for Russians.

So we went in search of some much needed breakfast. After that we made use of the hotel's pretty freaking awesome rooftop pool to cool off. Unfortunately we didn't have any towels because we have no room yet. But we rented a scooter and dried off pretty quickly.

While having breakfast we'd spotted a long cable car across the sea to one of the islands and decided to go check it out.

Turns out it was the entrance to Vinpearl Land. Ordinarily really not my thing but, we needed to kill some time before we could get into our hotel room and we were saving renting sun loungers on the beach for tomorrow (which we are hoping will be quieter, being a Monday).

So, off we went. Meh. It was pretty average. I loved the 12 min longest across-the-sea cable car in the world :) After arriving on the island, we went for the Alpine Coaster. Exactly like what I'd used to come down The Great Wall in China. But this one could have 2 per cart and was much longer. Kinda fun, but not much adrenalin required :)

After that we took 2 spins on their Roller Coaster which was quite fun. One of those short, 4 people to a cart ones. Just the way I like it.

We wandered thru to their Underwater World which was very average. Nothing like the 2Oceans or Ushaka.

Then it was off to the water park which The Trucker was super excited for ... I've never really been to onw. Most I've done were the Muizenberg super tubes as a kid occasionally. It was pretty disappointing tho. After leaving out stuff in a locker, we climbed all the way up these awfully-sore-on-your-feet stairs only to be told that you need a raft thing for this super tube. #Sigh. Unimpressed.

We did gone down the Space Hole and I was terrified on the Tsunami Slide. We had a swim in the ocean and then tried the family slide. Bad idea. You're supposed to use a massive 6-seater round rubber boat-thing but we saw people using the normal tubes so we grabbed a double-tube and headed up.

Halfway down the slide tho, we gained a little too much momentum and flipped. I was quite sore after flying thru the air and landing on the super tube. Those things are not soft! Ouch.

Before we headed back to our hotel, we had a look in at their Indoor Games area. Basically all sorts of video games and all free. We played one or two before leaving.

Yay, back at our hotel we could check into our room and we lazed around there for a while, having a shower, charging phones and sitting on our balcony enjoying the view. When booking our accommodation we'd especially splashed out a little on a sea view suite here. Since it was a single night between 2 overnight sleeper trains - haha!


For dinner we headed off to Yen's at a friend's suggestion and we weren't disappointed. We shared a Beef Papaya Salad and a Caramelized Shrimp Pot. Both were delish.

After dinner we took a walk along the beach, which was insanely crowded. In fact, the whole beach front area (Apparently it is school holidays here). Great vibe tho.

We came back to our room balcony and enjoyed ice-creams while watching (and trying to photograph) the stunning moon-rise directly in front of us over the ocean.