Quy Nhon
In case anyone is carefully following our progress on the map, we spent a night in Quang Ngai, then cycled on down Highway One as far as we could go before stopping in a hotel a few miles outside of Bong Son. Both places had fairly limited options for food, so we ended up having beef pho four meals out of six. But yesterday we arrived in Quy Nhon, which we had heard had nice beaches. Quy Nhon is only 230 km north of Nha Trang, so we decided to take a rest day and relax for a bit. The journey here was mostly uneventful…but Matthew’s bike is starting to feel the strain. First his chain got almost irretrievably wedged between two sprockets. Who knows what kind of permanent damage we may have caused getting that out. Then his front luggage rack broke about 20 km out of Quy Nhon. We should be able to get that welded back together, but for now we both have just one of the front panniers, which makes for some slightly wobbly steering.
Quy Nhon was a lot of fun. It’s on a peninsula, and therefore surrounded by beaches. It’s a busy little city, which has a lot of fishing, and not a lot of tourism. There aren’t many cars here, but the streets are swarming with motorbikes. On our first night we ate dinner at a restaurant on a pier over the ocean, and enjoyed it so much that we went there again tonight. We ordered completely different food, so it’s not as boring as it sounds. Pictures are on the food page. We had a great rest day, and looking back, it seems that a day at the seaside is pretty similar wherever you go. We slept in late, then had fish and chips for lunch at the town’s one backpacker cafe. They weren’t bad. We spent the afternoon on the beach, chasing crabs and building rivers and moats. Then we rounded off the day with ice cream sundaes at a completely empty ice cream parlour in the centre of town. Although the restaurant itself was empty, it was popular with locals as a bulk-buy take-away ice cream shop. We haven’t really seen big supermarkets in Vietnam, people still seem to buy food at markets, bakeries, butchers etc.
So all in all an excellent rest day. Thanks again for all the comments, and I hope everyone is enjoying the run up to Christmas. Quite a few shops here are decked out with tinsel and pumping out the Christmas tunes so we’re starting to feel pretty seasonal here ourselves.
AW
Photos from this post can be found here
Updated: statistics, food, maps, photos
Sounds just like a day out in Scarborough glad that you had a good rest day. Also pleased to hear that Christmas glitz and Frosty the Snowman is making it feel seasonal. Our seasonal weather continues night temps of -12 on Monday but it is warmer today at 0.
Enjoy the sunshine L x
Glad you feeling Christmassy!! Your photos are amazing……what kind of camera have you got? Eleanor is going to buy a new one with her Christmas money so I am interested to hear what make it is!