Wednesday, August 19, 2009

On the Way to Nha Trang

We were heading to Nha Trang for a couple days, then Dalat after. Our tour bus was just my family, my cousin's family, and her cousin's family! So no odd strangers. There were 16 of us so we got our own bus. The bus driver never talked and the tour guide ALWAYS talked. He was almost aggravating since my understanding of Vietnamese is very basic. However, by the end of our tour, both of them stopped being so "professional" and started acting cool haha. On the ride to Nha Trang, I saw the monastery above and snapped a picture.
We stopped at many locations during the tour. I think companies such as Son Thuy hire tour companies to stop at their places, kind of like an advertisement to bring them buyers. Son Thuy is a company that makes fish sauce - 'nuoc mam'. They were making fish sauce in the back of the building but unfortunately, I never got a chance to check it out.
Just by looking at this picture, can you imagine the stench of the place? Not sure what this was but for sure it's some type of unfiltered fermented fish and/or other seafood sauce. The caps are open to allow the wafting fumes to attract tourists I suppose... and to prevent explosions.
The image above are the fish in a pond surrounding the restaurant in the image below.
For lunch we ate at Yen Gia Quan. Phone: 741-019 Address: 53D Nguyen Dinh Chieu Price Range: 30,000d - 70,000d, around $2-5 CAD (although our food was covered by the tour!)
Starting from the very right going clockwise: goi (Vietnamese shredded cabbage salad) with flakes of deep fried fish on top (never seen this before eating that), caramelized claypot fish, stir fried prawns, stir fried greens (I don't remember what it was =( ), squid stir fried with tomatoes and zucchinis, canh chua (Vietnamese sweet and sour soup) with fish and veggies. It was SO good! I definitely recommend this restaurant. A lot of tourists pass through it so the food is really fresh and always new. Some may think that travellers should stay FAR away from tourist food but really, you'd be missing out. This is 100% traditional Vietnamese fare.
Once you see the sand dunes, you know you're getting close to Nha Trang (our plane trip to Vietnam got delayed by a few days, so we missed 'Miss Universe' by that many days!!!!! Stupid travel agencies..)
Took a washroom break near this magnificent breath-taking view! It was quite windy that day.
We walked down to the beach area and saw these steps leading to no where. They probably had to elevate the roads and whatnot since water levels might have gotten higher.
There, I spotted theses children. They ran around the area selling chunks of coral to tourists. (Don't buy it! Killing coral = BAD, VERY BAD)
Anyway, they were playing rock, paper, scissors. Probably to determine who gets to sell to the next wave of tourists.

1 comment:

  1. wow, the food looks DELICIOUS and that view looks so peaceful!

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