Halloween

Day 64

I had a flight early this morning for my trip to Nha Trang peninsula. The drive from the airport from the hotel was the most beautiful I've ever seen. Even prettier than Pacific Coast Highway to Pepperdine. You could see all the fishing boats out in the water. The sun was rising over islands in the background. Picture perfect. I couldn't ruin it by taking a picture. Plus I was on the wrong side of the bus.

At the hotel they greeted us with coconut milk drinks. They were much tastier than my first and only other coconut. From there we went to go see Husband Rock. It is the biggest rock on the peninsula, I guess. The story behind it is that a fisherman got caught out in a storm with big waves. His wife went out to save him, and they both got washed up on shore. Kinda sad, but romantic. The usual stuff.

From there we visited a Hindu temple to Shiva and the Devi goddess. It was from the time when Hinduism had just developed out of woodland folklore. It was also very influenced by Buddhism. In the different temple buildings were shrines of Shiva in Lingam form. The devi temple was the largest. Some girls were putting on a religious dance performance and several people were placing food out for a puja.

The site had an incredible view of the city and the bay as well.

Our next stop was the huge Dam Market. The guide explained that when Vietnamese went to market, they got everything they needed. Market was like Wal-Mart. They got food, furniture, clothes, gifts, jewelry, kitchenware, souvenirs, etc. And he didn't lie. It was all there. They had a wide variety of foods that I had never seen before.

The afternoon we had at our leisure. My roommate Rebecca, her friend Tess, and my friend Sarah walked across the street to the beach. A beautiful beach. The humidity didn't even bother us. There was a nice breeze. The only problem was the annoying vendors walking up to us and trying to sell us junk that we didn't want. Oh, and there was a dead rat floating in the water. But other than those things, it was paradise. We stayed out as long as we could take getting pestered by people inviting us to Halloween parties, then we rinsed off in the pool.

Tess and Rebecca invited me to join them in their plan to go to the spa. Who can pass that up? No one. I opted for a hot-stone massage and a reflexology massage. The spa was so amazing. We felt like we were celebrities (of course, I am) in our own secret place. They gave us ginger water when we walked in. After we decided on which treatment we wanted, they led us to a locker room where we changed into comfy robes. They even gave us flip flops and disposable undies.

The massages were phenomenal. Indescribable. Just great. I was so relaxed that I couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep half the time. After we were feeling good and had changed back into our normal clothes, they brought us more ginger water and some kind of delectable pudding/jello stuff.

We had to leave our oasis, though, and get back to the hotel before our group left for dinner. We went to a restaurant in a different hotel. The food was traditional seafood. It was very similar to the lunch we had been served: shrimp, cuddle-fish, rice, mackerel. Cats were scurrying around under the table. They had a band playing for us during dinner. One girl was playing the traditional Vietnamese instrument, which only has one string. It sounded amazing. Our chaperone said it was really hard to learn to play. I wish I had bought one; that would be a cool thing to learn.

After dinner I rode back to our hotel with Tess and Rebecca. We weren't really in the mood to go drinking. But we wanted to at least go out because it was Halloween. So we went for pizza (Rebecca was still hungry) and ice cream.

Everyone was out and dressed up for Halloween. I thought we were the only country to celebrate it, except maybe Britain, but they loved it here. Families were zooming around on their Vespas in costume. On our walk we ran into some Grim Reaper-looking guys. They were more than happy to take a picture with me. I think they were thrilled to get the attention from Americans. But Halloween wasn't much different in Vietnam than in the States: The kids had really cute costumes, while the older kids used it as an excuse to get as slutty as possible and drink. Ahh, the holidays.

Our ice cream was enough of a treat for me. We each got sundaes. Rebecca got five scoops, Tess had four, and I got three. It was mainly because we couldn't decide on one, or two. They were all really good alone and mixed well together, too.

After that we called it a night. It had gotten pretty late, and we were too exhausted from our early morning and busy day.