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24 June: Nha Trang

What a relaxing morning, we really were at the beach and acting like it. We were up at 09h00, ate breakfast and headed down to the beach. Along the way we stopped at a book exchange shop where I got another book, I had already finished 3 Tom Clancy books and started on another of his series. At the beach we found you needed to hire a beach chair with the straw umbrella. Normally we would have been tempted to stick with the sea sand, however considering we were on the Doxiciclin Malaria medication and that its effects were a heightened sun sensitivity, we opted for the safer option. At about 12h00, I headed back to purchase lunch, a selection of pineapple and ramputans, almost like same as lichies but different. We spent the morning and afternoon reading with intervals of swimming in the ocean. The ocean was warm, almost 28 Celsius, but cool enough to make it enjoyable in the heat that engulfed you on land.

The one thing about the beach, is the persistence of the local vendors. It's not only that they try to sell you fruit, books, paintings, cigarettes or drinks, but that they stay there all day and every 30 minutes they make a new round and ask you the same question 3 times before moving on. By the 50th time you've been asked whether you want a painting, one tends to want to stare silently in their eyes until they decided to move on. Instead you remain polite and merely say "no thank you".

By the late afternoon the locals were arriving in numbers, the once lonely beach had become swollen and everyone was enjoying the late afternoon waters. Although the wind had come up quite a bit causing the sea to become less than flat with waves growing ever larger. While we were packing up to leave, we watched locals selling seafood just in front of our straw covered umbrella. They were selling huge crayfish and equally large prawns for 300 000 Vietnamese Dong ($1 = 18 000 VD). We haggled a little on the price and decided to go for the smaller prawns selling for 250 000, in the end we bought &frac12; kg or 6 prawns. We sat there admiring the setting sun with our prawns, salad and spicy pepper and chili sauce. Much more expensive than we usually eat, but why not once in a while...

Back home we washed up, lathered ourselves with cream, seeing as both Leanne and I had received a little bit to much sun, Leanne more than I. Afterwards we walked to Octopus divers and booked 4 dives each with them, we would start with the first two tomorrow. After this we headed to town to find a nice restaurant, problem is that in Nha Trang the restaurants take advantage of the tourists and the food is much more expensive. We headed from restaurant to restaurant, almost 4 of them, before deciding to go for the footlong option. The footlong is filled with vegetables and two meats and some sauce. Back in RSA I would most probably have steered clear of the meats, but you lose all those kind of thoughts when in Asia on a budget trip! We had decided to go back to the restaurant we visited the previous evening and share another pizza. (Sharing different dishes is the name of the game for us in Asia) For 55 000 at most restaurants you would receive only a plate of rice, vegetables and chicken, at least here we could enjoy a pizza with sausage, mushrooms, oregano and mozzarella. We headed back, buying a chocolate - it was great - and water to keep us going and drawing some money for the days ahead.