*Nic : Living the Dream*: Mui Ne

So we left Siagon and spent 4.5 hours on a bus heading to Mui Ne. We had chosen to stay at a nice beach side resort so were very excited for some more relaxation and doing very little.

The place was lovely and the first evening we were invited to a wine and cheese welcome with the manager – an American guy named Steve. Apart from the fact that the wine tasted like syrup it was a nice evening and he gave us a nice introduction to the village etc.

Pool view leading down to the beach

The red sand dunes!

The beach

Check him out!!!

Posing!!

Mui Ne was much quieter than we expected with very few restaurants and definitely no night life.

We enjoyed the quietness and made the most of it, lying by the pool all morning until the daily heavy thunder and lightening rain storm at 3.30pm ish for a couple of hours. The breakfast at this resort was also lovely – a fresh omelette made to order was a very welcome start to the day.

One evening we went to a Mexican restaurant recommended by the owner and we really enjoyed it – I was very pleased to have some fajitas as I thought I had waved goodbye to those until NZ.

The hotel put on a buffet bbq on the Saturday night – it was fantastic. All fresh raw fish and meat on display and you select what you want and they bbq it for you, accompanied by a very extensive salad, rice etc buffet. A very enjoyable evening and the start of our pool championship. It was 1.0 to me very quickly haha!!

Seabass!

Crabs and oysters!

Shrimps, steak, chicken etc!! all yum!

The food being bbq'd!

My selection - YUM!!

We braved a very early start 1 morning (6.30am) to go on a free walking tour run by our hotel. Mui Ne is a fishing village so the walk took us down to the beach where the boats were being docked and the fish brought in to be sold to people for their market stall/restaurants etc. The volume of shrimps and crabs of all sorts was unbelievable – see the pics below.

Buffalo pulling the fish out of the water!

A collection of shrimps!!

Early morning walkers at the market!

6.30am fish market barely a free space on the beach!

Buffalo!

Our resort was surrounded by red sand dunes which was a bit of a novelty and tourist attraction but due to the heat during the day and the rain during the early evening before dark, we didn’t manage to venture to the top but it was nice to look at.

We had a nice relaxing few days then headed back to Siagon 4 days later...probably our worst experience so far. The ‘coach’ we had paid for and were supposed to be getting turned out to be a small mini bus (about the size of a school mini bus) so it was very squashed and worst of all the air conditioning was broken. 4.5hours with no air conditioning in 35 degree heat outside is really not fun. The driver told us to open the window (Which we did) but this resulted in hot musty humid air...which was better than no air at all. Arriving in Siagon very weary and not very happy we looked for the first pub and James tucked into a large Tiger and me a large Strawberry smoothy – strange the things you want after sweating half your body weight for 4.5 hours lol!!

We had our final afternoon in Siagon mostly spent wondering about taking pictures, I bought a new book and then dinner.

We were up this morning at 6.30am for the 6 hour bus to Cambodia...looking forward to seeing Phnom Phen and Siam Reap, Ankor Watt etc.

1 week today left in Asia (Monday)............