Today was bliss. Three awesome dives for my last day in Nha Trang. It was amazing, really. Let me tell you a little bit about it (I know, non divers will find this boring).

The first dive is called the lighthouse. Of course, it's because it's close to one, but the dive site itself is actually a big rock, of which only bit is above water. We dove from the boat near the rock and there was no current. We went straight down, hitting the bottom at 32 meters. Our bottom time was 36 minutes only because the vast majority of our dive was around this rock, on the bottom and... we all come up when one diver hits 50 bars. Of course, it wasn't me. Including the safety stop at 5 meters, I ended the dive with 70 bars, which is actually quite good... 

Second dive was called "Small Wall". We went to 25 meters and stayed 42 minutes under water. At first it was really awful because we went in three groups, being 10 in total. Of course there were the camera crazies, and i don't know why but, as soon as you put a toy like this in the hands of a diver, he forgets all the basics. So we had three of them, vertical, finning, raising sand as hell. Visibility : 0.50m... Oh great. No wonder I still don't take my underwater camera with me... Grrrrrr. Then the groups split and it became better. We went up to 18 meters and I had a fantastic time in canyons, around the rocks... Awesome.

Third dive was of course a shallow one. We stayed at 13 meters for an hour in a beautiful coral garden... (called either Pipe Beach or Mushroom Bay) Peaceful, colored, lively. A pleasure. When we came up it was raining. My guide (fantastic one, Huy) told me "s*** it's raining"... I replied "damn, we're gonna get wet ! You have an umbrella by chance ?"... We were laughing like two kids on the surface.

The good thing about Vietnam diving is that there is nothing to see in the blue, because there is no depth for a while. So therefore, you waste no time looking at the blue. You spend time exploring walls, holes, small pinnacles... It's gorgeous. Actually, of course there is much much much less fish there than in the red sea, and they are much smaller (fishing on dive sites is not regulated in Vietnam) but... The red sea is declining, clearly. We are now seeing the last beautiful spots and if you want to do spotless dives, go on a safari... Here it feels like the worst is behind and that the reef is slowly picking up. They are not allowed to fish with dynamite anymore since quite some time and it's beautiful to see a reef growing like this. Local divers here are sad when they see dead coral... They should see the red sea !

As a conclusion regarding diving in Nha Trang, it's a beautiful experience and you get to pay much more attention to small things because you are not distracted by huge ones like in the Red Sea. I mean here, I laughed the first time the guide showed me a lionfish... It's not that easy to spot some here. When you go snorkeling in the red sea, you need to be careful to avoid them... So of course, I was like "yeah yeah, lionfish, whatever...". On the contrary, I was so excited to see those blue sea stars ! And there the guide was like "yeah yeah, a blue sea star, whatever..." :-)))

And I saw amazing little things such as tons of nudibranches, shrimps, pipefish, featherstars, tubeworms, baby morays, baby octopuss... And plenty of species I didn't know at all ! Such as the flying gurnard, for example, or a peacock mantis shrimp (nice size...). I was also introduced to this terrible starfish : the crown of thorns starfish, actually not good at all... Only one predator, which doesn't exist enough. These starfish reproduce fast and can only die if you trap them under a rock or take them out of the water. If you cut them, they become two. Inject them with chlorine, they deal with it and half an hour later, they're as good as new. There has been operations where all divers from an area would just go into various dive sites and pick up those cancers, bring them up and burn them. Indeed, this starfish, like others, eats coral ! Let them reproduce too much and it's the end of submarine life...

All in all, I loved Nha Trang diving ! If you go there, dive with Angel Dive. Fred is real nice, and his two guides Huy and Kim are awesome guides. Funny, outgoing, showing you stuff, a pleasure !

I am off tomorrow morning... For the next five days, I might not be reachable (I don't know !) because I am off with an easy rider through the highlands, along the Ho Chi Minh trail from Nha Trang, up, and then to Hoi An. it's a five day / four night trip, and about 900 Km. I don't know if I'll be able to publish. If you don't hear from me ever, then know that the guy responsible is Tân, 42, Vietnamese, medium height, quite skinny and dark hair. With such a description, you should find him easily (mouhahahahahaha !)...

See ya !

Nadege