Mui Ne: Resorts and Dunes

If we've learned one thing by now it's that taking a bus always results in a good story. We arrived in Mui Ne by bus around 1am only to be dropped off about 3 miles from our hotel, but conventinely directly in front of the bus company's hotel. Determined to not fall into their trap, we began walking towards our hotel, not fully aware of the distance. After about 20 minutes of walking and seeing very little change in the address numbers, we were getting nervous. Luckily, two motorbike taxis pulled up and after a ten minute high-speed ride we arrived at our hotel. Our place turned out to be a dingy bungalow with windows that didn't open and in the morning we opted to look for a new room.

We decided to visit Mui Ne for more beach time. The coastal town is famous for its sand dunes and wind/kite-surfers. The beach is lined with bungalows and resorts, but other than that there isn't much of an actual town.

Our first morning we walked the main road to find breakfast and stumbled upon a fancy resort where we were able to grab a breakfast buffet. We completely binged. The resort (Blue Ocean) had a great pool area and since it was only a bit more than the previous night's room, we splurged and settled down in lounge chairs. We spent the morning sitting by the pool, swimming, and reading up on the next leg of our journey in Cambodia.



In the afternoon we rented a motorobike and drove out to the sand dunes. At the dunes we rented sheets of plastic from children and went sledding. It's a fun ride down, but the way up is absolutely exhausting. You crawl on all fours, and each step you take results in sliding backwards about two steps. We only found enough motivation for two rides each. There are some more great pictures of this so check out the whole album.



This shot gives you an idea of the scale and steepness of it. That's Lindsey flying down.



Sand, sun, and a climbing dunes left us exhausted, but Steve looked particularly gross.



In the evening we had another Indian dinner at Shree Ganesh which was great and watched some terrible TV before falling asleep.

Our second day, we relaxed by the pool and did little else. Steve considered going kite surfing, but figured that one day probably wasn't enough to get going. Tonight we head to Saigon on a quick five hour bus that will no doubt result in something odd happening. There we will regroup with Lindsey's dad for our final stop together and take in the sites of another crazy city.