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29.10.09Playing lazy buggers, I get out of bed at midday and decide to walk to the far end of town and see the rest of the Mui Ne strip. The place is basically one road that follows the beach and as I walk along, I realise that it isn't really a backpacker/traveler place and the amount of seriously nice and high class resorts definitely puts the place up at the top end. Some of the places look phenomenal and I definitely want to come back one year and live it up in one of the nice resorts.My indulgence of last night has sown the seed of the splurge in me and so I end up donning my Green Flash trainers, a Flash Gordon t shirt and my flashpack and going for lun
ch at Cham Villas. Cham Villas classes it self as a Boutique Luxury Resort and consists of 16 luxury villas in 9000m2 of tropical gardens with a 60m private beach, average. Sitting in their restaurant listening to light jazz and lounge music, sipping on glasses of Chardonnay was quite nice, although they probably wondered what I was doing walking in wearing my swimming trunks a pair of walking sandals and an old green t-shirt. The seal on my last few days of living it up has been broken and I don't want to think about what tomorrow will entail.
28.10.09Absorbing the sun, relaxing on the sand, watching the kite surfers, dipping in the surf my self and reading a good book are today's activities. After a reasonably late wake up I kick back on the beach and relax, no plans apart from chilling over the last few days of my travels.
Come evening time, it's just me and Clare left as Lee departed for Saigon this morning. Clare isn't really a backpacker, she is more of a flashpacker and with me cutting my travels short by a month, I have some spare cash floating around. We head over to a snazzy restaurant called Snow for dinner and pick up a Belgium guy called Micheal on the way. It's a Russian owned place and is definitely devoid of backpackers as it is one of the more expensive places in Mui Ne. Throughout our time in the restaurant/bar, I have a Manhattan cocktail, a delicious tiger prawn salad, fresh grilled fish fillets with a tiger prawn and caviar creamy sauce, chocolate orange cake as desert and then a White Russian to finish off. Even though I thoroughly indulged and this is an expensive place in Mui Ne, it still all comes to only £16. After dinner we hit Sakura, a very very very cool, chic and trendy bar complete with it's own pool and sun loungers in an all white LED lit interior set right on the beach. Some beers and cocktails see us through until 2am in what is a very indulgent night, but still so cheap compared to back home.
27.10.09Up at a still d
ark 4.30 and I pack my bags and am ready and on the beach at 5.30am ready to catch the sunrise, which I'm hoping will be worth the early effort. It appears I have arrived to the beach late, not because of the sunrise, but because the beach is the most rammed that I have seen it so far. There are Vietnamese people exercising, swimming in the sea, playing football, pacing 
up and down the beach and basically just doing their normal morning exercise routines, but just amazingly early. By the time it hits 7-ish they will all be gone and the beach will be empty again until all us tourists rise up out of bed and get down there. It's such an unexpected sight to see them all up and about so early, but is quite cool, and the sunrise, my whole reason for being up so early was nice as well.
At 6.30, my bus leaves for Mui Ne and it pulls into the one road town around 1-ish. Mui Ne, is a small town on an epic stretch of beach that must be at least 9 miles long and forms a huge circular arc. The town is mainly located at one end and then a road leads around the beach all the way to the far end and is dotted with small resorts and hotels with beach side bungalows that are literally on the beach. I walk for about 40 mi
ns along the beach to the hotel where Clare and Lee are staying and get my $10 room which is all of 15 seconds walk from the sand.
26.10.09Clare and Lee have gone on to Mui Ne today and so I'm left to my own devices on this sunnier day. Hitting some pre work Geneva admin and emails entertains my morning before a walk over to the beach to laze around in the afternoon. My plan is to relax and try 
and even out some of my tan which has me sporting vicious tan lines where I have been wearing t-shirts in the sun over the past two months. I'm not sure how successful I will be in the remaining 6 days away but it's worth a try. Once again, the beach is rammed to the rafters and I can't move for the people stumbling over me as I relax and read some Ernest Hemingway in a very sophisticated beach bumming session.I fully intend to go for some food tonight but end up finding that there is a TV in my room and after not watching TV in 3 months I end up watching 4 films one after another until the early hours of the morning. Not long to go now before I'm back home. It's sad to think I have seven nights left away and then I will be back home in the UK. The journey has been so good and I've met so many people and experienced so many different things. I'm not sure if I want it to continue or I'm just sad that it is coming to an end, as I do want to be back home and am ready to leave.
25.10.09Rain rain rain is the order of the day and the more than inviting weather is putting any kind of beach action thoroughly off limits. I sit down in the hotel lobby and drink tea with some of the hotel staff and also Clare and Lee, two people who I have been stalking all the way down from Hanoi, Hue and Hoi An. Vietnam has such a treaded route from north to south, that if you set off from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh or vice versa, you will see the same faces at nearly every stop. People travel the same routes and stay roughly the same amount of time in each place and so you are guaranteed to bump into them. As outside activities are being thoroughly rained off me and Clare take a walk to a photography gallery at the other end of town. It's by a famous Vietnamese photographer who shoots only in black and white and never in digital. He develops all his own photographs in his home studio in the back of his Kitchen. His photos are very good and capture different scenes from Vietnamese life, a boy running across the back of buffaloes, pictures of very old Vietnamese women looking weather worn and spaced out and one prize wining piece of a child crying are amongst his best for me.Come evening time we eat out in a Vietnamese restaurant that serves food the size of fish pellets, so luckily I ordered two mains in anticipation and then have a few beers until a respectable 11pm. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather and some sun and sand time.
ch at Cham Villas. Cham Villas classes it self as a Boutique Luxury Resort and consists of 16 luxury villas in 9000m2 of tropical gardens with a 60m private beach, average. Sitting in their restaurant listening to light jazz and lounge music, sipping on glasses of Chardonnay was quite nice, although they probably wondered what I was doing walking in wearing my swimming trunks a pair of walking sandals and an old green t-shirt. The seal on my last few days of living it up has been broken and I don't want to think about what tomorrow will entail.
