Last evening in Mui Ne

Mui Ne

Mui Ne - a kite surfers' paradise. There are lots of beautiful resorts, which are still affordable (and which you have to sneak through to get to the beach - there is NO public access to the beach!), but still five or ten times the price of our humble room in a back street (12 $). So we rather invested our money into the sheer unimaginable array of seafoods!!

Our favourite restaurant: breakfast or rather brunch (mango pancakes, fruit shakes, the great Vietnamese coffee, omelette with baguette, noodle soup and ginger, lemon & mint tea! All together for less than 10 $) with a view of kite surfers flying past and for diner: any kind of seafood you can imagine!

So we ALMOST ended up - against all moral doubts - trying baby shark. Just because Allan, the nice Brazilian globe trotter we met, so raved about the baby shark he once - inspite of moral doubts, too! - enjoyed in India. But. We didn't. Couldn't. Are looking at him every morning instead and seeing that he's still alive after he was carried to our table in a plastic bag. Without water. No. No baby shark for us anymore. Maybe snake??!

Fish sauce production is a big thing here in Southern Vietnam.

Fairy Spring.

Refreshment Bar. Every petrol station here along the freeway has at least a dozen hammocks on offer for weary by-passers - such an easy and cheap thing, we should have that in Europe!

The fishing village of Mui Ne - still there and beautiful; nowadays there are more tourists than fisher men though.

And now: the famous sand dunes of Mui Ne:


Holger sand sliding.

Allan and Raquel, the nice Brazilian couple we made friends with.




We booked this as a "sunset tour". So you would assume that you get to see the sun set. So we stayed - until sunset. Any logic missing so far? Our driver apparently thought so - he got so furious about us and that we stayed "too long", that he left us alone there in the dunes! An old woman took our hands and guided us along the street for almost a kilometre, where he was still fuming and raging in the jeep - but he did take us home after that. Always check - as the Lonely Planet says: if necessary, in writing! - what the exact times and itineraries of a booked tour are.

Mekong Delta - two day tour

The bus was a bit small for westerners....

but the boat tours along different side arms of the Mekong were beautiful!



On the islands we heard some traditional music...

... ate lots of wonderful tropical fruit and - a "dinosaur egg" (which was a very cleverly baked rice meal pastry)...

... saw a crocodile farm...

... and got to hold a python.

Then we spend the night on a "home stay", a family house in the countryside.

Our hosts showed us how to make springrolls and gave us plenty of rice wine to drink.

In the morning we took a sunrise stroll along the rice fields...


And got a - somewhat basic - breakfast consisting of one fried egg and baguette with tea.

But at least it didn't come out of their breeding pond! (Well, actually we learned to love frog legs in Cambodia.)

Then we went to the famous floating markets!

The vendors put and example of the goods they sell on the roof of their boats or on a long stick - we saw every tropical fruit and vegetable I could possibly think of.


Freshly brewed coffee!!


We learned how rice paper (for spring rolls) and rice noodles are made.


And we visited a beautiful fruit garden and saw how durians, jackfruit, mangoes, banana, papaya, star fruit, star apples, some other fruit I can't name, pineapples and dragon fruit grow!



Our guide took a small puppy home from one of the villages (not to eat, but as a pet!!) and the tiny cute little thing found many caring arms and laps from all of us tourists on the bus to spend the long ride back to Saigon on.