 Hello from the beach-side resort town of Nha Trang on the sunny east coast!  We're booked into a really luxurious Western-style hotel! Above you see we've set up our mobile RideDOT.com workspace AKA "bed". Neda is devouring the latest book on her Kindle and I'm next to her blogging away. Such a familiar setup! This is the way we lived for almost a decade on the road! Most of the time, it's nowhere as luxurious as this, though... Vietnam is one of the cheapest countries we've visited. Food and lodging is roughly 1/10th the price of what it would cost in Canada. We're staying on the 18th floor of a luxury hotel, with an ocean-side view and the price is $35 CDN ($26 USD) a night!  This is the view from our window! Wow! Even our shower has an ocean-view! It has a window with a curtain, so you see the ocean while you are lathering up! LOL! What I like about the washrooms in Vietnam and all over Asia is that they provide bum guns next to the toilet. Much nicer on the nether regions than toilet paper! However, our hotel room's bum gun is super powerful! The first time I used it, I was a bit too enthusiastic with the trigger the water shot up so hard I think a little bit came out my mouth... Enema-Gene my surprise at that!  We're just across the street from the beach! Wow!  Setting aside the blog and following Neda's lead, reading on the beach We're blessed with beautiful, clear and sunny weather but we find it too hot to be outside after 10AM. We only venture out after 3PM to catch the last couple of hours of sunlight. Our pasty-pale winter skin is not used to so much sun! We've been covered up by motorcycle gear the entire time we've been in Vietnam!  Nha Trang's beach is a great place to lounge around and people-watch From what we've seen, most international travelers visiting Vietnam make a beeline straight to the beaches, especially during the winter. When we were up in the central highlands, the only tourists we saw were Vietnamese from other parts of the country (probably HCM). In other parts of the world, we've become very familiar with the term used for foreigners. In Latin America, it's "gringo". "Gaijin" in Japan, "muzungu" in Africa, and "farang/falang" in Thailand/Laos. I looked up the word in Vietnamese. Uh... Nope. I can't pronounce it (Vietnamese is hard!), so we just resort to using "farang" every time we see a non-Asian wandering around Vietnam. We've seen more farangs in Nha Trang than anywhere else in our travels so far in this country!  Islands off in the distance The calm waters of Nha Trang beach are a product of the cluster of islands just off the coast, which provide a natural breakwater from the choppy waves of the South China Sea. As a result, there is a burgeoning coral reef system in Nha Trang Bay that is quite popular with scuba divers. We've booked a snorkeling tour with a diving company for tomorrow morning! Can't wait!  Art class on the beach! Part of the reason why we blog is so we can get in touch with other moto-travelers. We've been in contact with a couple of bikers who are traveling through in Vietnam the same time as we are. One of them advised us to eat as much farang-food while in tourist-friendly Nha Trang, just in case we get sick of Vietnamese food and can't find anything else while on the road. Sick of Vietnamese food? Is that even possible? Challenge accepted! Just in case, we went out for sushi and pizza!  Neda eats her pizza from the middle out. At this rate, there'll only be a ring of crust left in 10 minutes time...  Also picked up some yummy pastries from this Singaporean bakery We've booked three nights in Nha Trang. A nice, long beach vacation with lots of tasty food on hand!  Nha Trang at night. Tram Huong Tower in the background This uniquely-shaped structure is a museum and is designed to look like a lotus flower, which is the symbol of the city of Nha Trang.  A romantic date night on the beach We've discovered that it's not just any run-of-the-mill farang that run-around-this-mill. They're Russian farang! Faruskies?  We first noticed it when all the signs were subtitled in Cyrillic, then we realized: there's a lot of Russian being spoken around us! Nha Trang has been invaded by Russians! Just like Phuket. And also Ukraine... Sorry. Too soon...? I remember when we were in Phuket, the staff in the restaurants and convenience stores would automatically say "Spasiba" to all their customers, regardless of if they Russian or not. That's how many Russian tourists visit that beach town.  As affordable as Vietnam is for tourists, we still find ourselves having to hit the ATM quite frequently. This is because nobody accepts credit cards here. The fees are too high for merchants, so Vietnam is basically a cash-only society.  Durian Ice Cream. This is the last time Neda smiled for the next 48 hours... Those two things might not be unrelated... Neda got violently ill that night. I'll spare you the gory details, but it involved explosive diarrhea, intense stomach-twisting cramps, muscle aches, dizzying nausea and several bouts of the two-handed-toilet-seat-clenching dry heaves. No diving tomorrow morning... :( It's a bit puzzling. We've both eaten *exactly* the same things and only she's gotten sick. However, we've learned via our travels through India and Mexico that Neda is a Gastroenterical Distant Early Warning. I usually get sick 8 hours after she does. So all morning, I was waiting with dread for the other shit, er... shoe to drop, the threat of Delhi Belly hanging over my... um, belly. I went out in search of breakfast for the both of us. Finding food for me was easy, there's a Bahn Mi food stall right next store to the hotel.  This is the owner of the bahn mi place. No kidding, she trotted around like she owned the place and wore a different outfit every day!  Our breakfasts look very different this morning... Bahn mi for me, and crackers to settle Neda's stomach plus some electrolyte replenishment tablets... :( Oresol is the SE Asia equivalent of Pedialyte. Neda was bedridden for the entire day. I spend the whole day waiting for my turn to be hunched over the porcelain throne... but it never happened. *whew* Dodged the Bullet train to Brownsville! Later on that evening, I went out to grab some Thai food for dinner to celebrate the fact that I wasn't getting sick (yay!). The waitress who took my order asked me if I was Korean. "No, Canadian", I replied. She looked at me like I just said something that didn't quite add up, like I just proclaimed that "1+1=3!" "My family is from Malaysia." "Ah, Malaysia! Neighbours!", her eyes lit up like I confirmed that 1+1 really did equal 2. "But you look Korean", she added. Once again, my Universal Asian status is reconfirmed. Everywhere I go, I get mistaken for every kind of Asian ethnicity. Even by my own family. On the way over here, we ran into my cousin at the airport. She and her family were flying back to Malaysia. She introduced me to her kids: "This is your Uncle Gene". Her eldest son whispered to her, "But mum, he looks Japanese..." LOL! Well, it's been a restful three days of sun, fun and farang-food... at least for one of us... We're scheduled to depart today. The staff have moved our bikes to the underground parking garage (or have the bikes moved themselves...?) and we relocate our motos outside so we can pack our stuff and head out. As I ride up the ramp, something feels very off, the steering is wobbly and I have no control! I pull up in front of the hotel and one of the parking attendents points at my rear tire: flat! Uh oh.  The staff at the hotel are great. They bring out their compressor and pump up the rear tire for me. The tire appears to be holding air, so it might be a slow leak, a small puncture in the inner tube. The rental company didn't supply us with any tools to change the tire. Instead they recommended we just limp the bike to a shop and have it repaired there. The shops are everywhere (is that a statement of the state of the roads in Vietnam?) and it would be quick and cheap, they said. The hotel staff help me find a motorcycle repair shop and I ride off by myself since Neda still feels more comfortable being within running distance to a toilet bowl. Runs being the operative word... The moto repair place turned out to be a scooter shop. They took one look at my motorcycle and shook their head and said something in Vietnamese. I shook my head in return and said something in English. I think they only worked on scooters. I used Google Translate to ask if there was a shop that could fix my tire and they punched in an address in Google Maps. OMG, Google is truly going to take over the world, aren't they...? I ride over to the shop they recommended and it turns out they are a tire shop. They work on all vehicles: scooters, cars and motorcycles. At least I *hoped* they worked on motorcycles. There were quite a lot of people waiting in line before me, so it took about an hour for them to get to my bike. The tech tried to push my moto to the workspace... and got nowhere. It was still in first gear. He motioned me to put it into neutral. Uh oh... he doesn't know how to put a motorcycle into neutral?
Next, he tries to jack up my bike with a car jack because it doesn't have a centerstand. The car jack is too low and he needed to find a shim to jam between the jack and the motorcycle. Takes him a long time to find the attachment in the back of the garage. All this is not inspiring a lot of confidence that he's done this very often... if at all... This is definitely because there aren't many actual motorcycles out on the road. Mainly scooters. I estimate less than 1% of all two-wheelers are motorcycles. And almost all of them small-displacement bikes likes ours. All relative though. Our 150cc bikes are giants compared to the sea of 50cc scooters swarming around us... The tech manages to get the wheel off, quickly strips the inner tube with a practiced dexterity, and proceeeds to dunk it in the vat of water behind him. My confidence in him is regained. He finds the puncture and shows it to me. I nod my head like he's a waiter showing me the label on an expensive bottle of wine and he proceeds to patch the tube and puts my motorbike back into rideable shape. All in, around $10 CDN. I'm sure he overcharged me, since I saw a scooter guy in front of me slip him $5, but I think he treated me like a car because of all the extra work he had to do to get the wheel off. It took a long time to hop between shops, wait in line and get the tube finally patched. We had already started the riding day late due to our laziness and I txted Neda to ask whether we should be staying an extra day. Her reply came back, "I'm in the washroom. We should stay an extra day!" Alrighty then! Back to the beach!
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