Nha Trang

We arrived in Nha Trang at 4:00am, after a long night on another Vietnamese night bus. Nha Trang is a smallish resort town on Vietnam's south-central coast. It's known for its beautiful beach, and is very, very popular with Russian tourists.

The past two months in Vietnam have been very, very busy. Yes, we've done a lot of sightseeing, especially in Da Nang, but I've also been working extremely hard teaching English online.

We stayed for almost two weeks in Nha Trang, and finally got a chance to rest a little bit (while still working, of course). The city is pretty small, and we saw all of the sights in just a few days. After that, we gave ourselves permission to be a little lazy and enjoy the beach!

Nha Trang is the hottest place we've been in Vietnam so far! When not at the beach, we spend most of our time indoors, trying to keep cool in the air conditioning.

One day, we took a long walk to the far southern end of the beach to the Vietnamese National Oceanographic Museum. I especially loved their big sea turtle habitat!

It's more than just an aquarium, although there are lots of fish and sea creatures to see. The museum also has a huge exhibit all about ocean animals, conservation, fishing... basically everything involving the sea.

There's even a big library of preserved specimens of all sorts of creatures that you can spend a long, long time wandering around and looking at.

Besides the museum, though, we didn't do a whole lot in Nha Trang. Being on our feet every day and moving around so much, while fun, is exhausting. Finally, we just needed to take some time and rest. We found a really great routine, though! Every day we would walk through town to the mall, Vincom Plaza. There, we would browse around a bit, enjoying the air conditioning. We would get an iced coffee, then go shopping at the supermarket. Doing our own shopping and eating simple things like sandwiches or instant noodles and a boiled egg is a really great way to save money while we are traveling, especially in a tourist town where food can be quite expensive.