...My Own Final Fantasy

beach town.... it's a strip town. basically one long strip along the ocean with hotels everywhere. if it were in season, i'd easily name this the tourist hotspot of vietnam. they even had mock hollywood style lettering on an island across the water on an island, spelling out 'vinpearl'. apparently you can take lifts or boats over the water to an amusement park. unfortunately we did not do this..... and in retrospect maybe we should have. the main problem was we had booked a flight to bangkok for may 1st and were kind of rushing down the country to saigon in time. it worked out okay, because landon and i agreed that we may have overstayed in many places early in the trip. particularly certain places in cambodia.... anyways. we didn't do the amusement park, but we did do a boat day trip involving snorkeling and drinking and watching a ghetto boy band. and we also went to an aquarium, which was a bitch of a walk across town. it was a fairly uneventful aquarium, although it did have a large collection of massive sea turtles and pickled specimens. i also really enjoyed teasing the sharks, which i believe landon has an embarassing video of me doing. oh, i forgot. it also smelled of paint. they were repainting everything blue, of all colours. blue. for an aquarium! what! the boating day tour was also good though i didn't think so at first. it started poorly because i was lazy with getting myself together and ate breakfast too late and the bus was waiting for little old me. landon was pissed. we made it anyways and it was long forgotten by the time we got our boat. our boat which was ghetto compared to the sweet boat we had in ko phi phi... it was so cramped for space. we made it to open water and the crew dished out snorkeling gear. a german woman and her son were wise and brought their own gear, where the rest of us suffered with the crap provided. i don't know, is my head too big? the damn goggles did NOT fit around my head. i kind of got one on and i tried to swim 3 times and each time sea water filled up my mask. so lame. i guess i sulked for the next little bit until they prepared food. it was a magnificent feast that pleased everyone. afterwards, they promised alive show featuring their very own boyband! hmmm., yes. well, this was basically the crew pulling out this rusty ghetto drumkit where the cymbals were empty milk bottles etc, and some really old, worn down guitars. they covered a bunch of songs. if i remember correctly, they did cocaine by clapton, hotel california by the eagles, roxxxxxxxanne! and so on and so on.... the beers came out at this point, which was a good primer for the next event. apparently, we were going to go have some wine in the ocean. one of the crew had a floating minibar that he threw into the water and swam to it with a milk crate full of bottles of wine. then they threw out lifesavers for everyone to float on while he served up each and every bottle free of charge. i drank and swam like a fish. we did a few jumps of the boat for fun and then moved on. we did some stop at an island, where you had to pay to get off the boat. a few of us didn't want to so we stayed on and made friends with each other. we met a really nice couple from austria that we met later on for bia hoi. i love meeting europeans because i've now established contacts with some all over europe. free couches to crash on! that was it for nha trang. good restaurants, good beach, good boat tour. our 2nd last stop is mui ne, and i'm looking forward to it. sand dunes!