Travel Day: Hoi An: Waiting For the Night Bus

With our bus not leaving 'til seven in the evening, the majority of our day was spent in relative limbo. Fear of missing our departure meant there was little motivation for us to explore too far out of town. And so the morning was wiled away catching up on current events on the old TV precariously seated on a chair next to my bed and lazily gathering our belongings for another night on a bus.

It was around noon when we figured it best to head downstairs so the staff wouldn't have to come up and forcefully evict us from the premises. We dropped off our bags in the front lobby, paid the tab and wandered out to savour our remaining hours in Nha Trang. My camera came along for the ride (because I'm not trusting enough to leave my valuables untended).

Pickup trucks are far from affordable for the average person here so people come up with creative ways to compensate:

The large park by the beach is surprisingly empty during the daytime (probably because of the soaring daytime temperatures)

..but at around five O'clock, a number of old buses packed full of locals pull up along the beach front:

...And the sky soon fills with colourful plastic kites

Na na na na na na na na.....

Small businesses swarm in from all corners to capitalize on the crowd. A few old ladies cart around these big weigh scales (I found it strange that a lot of them looped the theme from Titanic through the built in speaker):

Other ladies go about the beach bothering sunbathers with baskets full of cheap snacks. The one worth trying is the giant rice cracker (the size of a basketball hoop).



Not to be outdone by their religious contemporaries, the (generally) atheist communists here have spared no expense to bring in their own brand of non-denominational Christmas lights:


Our midnight pit stop proved rather challenging. For future reference "NAM" is Vietnamese for "Men."