Mui Ne

Happy Holidays Everyone!! We left Ho Chin Minh City today and caught a bus to Rach Gia which sits on the southern coast of Vietnam. Tomorrow will be catching a ferry to Pho Quoc Island to spend a few days to bask in the glorious sunshine. The last 4 days have been great but HOT! We've never felt such a relenting, miserable heat before.... day and night mid- 30's with super high humidity.

On Dec 10 we caught another fantastic night bus 5 hours south to Mui Ne which is a resort town on the southeast coast of Vietnam...

If your wondering why my face looks like a giant tomato, it would be due to the wind burn I received riding my sweet "hog" to Dalat.... + a little bit of sunburn... and a little bit of whiskey to easy the pain of a uncomfortable bus ride.

The next morning we finally awoke to what we had been waiting for...

We quickly caught up on our reading and enjoyed some of the local fruit...

We had rented another motorbike that morning so late in the afternoon we headed off on another journey (pretty used to Vietnam driving by now). This time the goal was to reach Mui Ne's sand dunes... without a map lol... We gave ourselves lots of time, however, still managed to get very lost and nearly took every road imaginable other then the one we were supposed to (my bad... Stacey is the new navigator). Always great scenery along the way though.

Once we made it out of the city and on the proper road, we still had about 20km or so to go until the sand dunes. Again with no map this made it pretty difficult to find. So we formulated a plan to wait by the road until a Tour Jeep (many tour companies offer guided tours to the dunes) passed us, at which point we would just follow them. Almost overheated our shitty little scooter in the process lol.

It was mostly pavement the whole away except for the last 5km or so which consisted of gravel and sand... riding a bike on sand is NOT fun...

But we finally managed to make it! There's a small tourist area at the entrance (park/area is free) and a place to park. From that point it's about another km by foot to the dunes...

But we made it... and what a crazy sight to behold. A mini desert that lies just of the coast, and the sand was superb! We had a blast tooling around. Gives you quite the calf workout too.

I couldn't resist... had to try rolling down...

End result: came out unscathed but got sand in my eye... note to self - don't get sand in your eye

The size of the dunes is quite large (3 square KM or so) and there are actually more of them in the area, just not white ones. The biggest sand dunes were actually closer to Mui Ne then this one was but the sand was red and not supposed to be as nice. There actually weren't that many tourists either and you kind of got the feeling that you had the whole place to yourself. There were of course touts at the entrance though, renting quads and crazy carpets!

Mmmm... sand...

Well that does it for Mui Ne! We left the next day at noon, hopping a bus onward to HCMC. Definitely enjoyed our time in Mui Ne and would have stayed longer if it was possible. However we only have a 30 day Tourist Visa for Vietnam which in actuality doesn't give you a heck of a lot of time to work your way down the whole country. Though I know we've seen lots, I also know we've missed out on plenty of cool sights. Our time is just breezing by and in a matter of days now we will be in Cambodia. Hard to imagine... feels like just yesterday we embarked on our journey. Oh well... stay tuned for Ho Chi Minh City...