Joy Ride

We are still in Mui Ne, Vietnam...

On Monday we drove about 100km along the coastline on a motorcycle and viewed the most amazing scenery. During the last few days, it was really hot and windy by noon and the breeze from riding the bike was most welcomed.

Starting the day near the local market, G's new habit is Vietnamese soup for breakfast; mine is ice coffee! (I rarely drunk coffee or tea before.)

We headed down to the village harbor, took lots of time to observe and interacted with the locals. It was so fascinating to watch their morning activity!  We plan to go back again one very early morning, 6 am,  to see more action. 

The harbor activity is almost indescribable. There are hundreds of boats, big and small, that are anchored about a 100 feet from shore. Mostly women then unload the boats catch and transfer it to smaller Basket Boats and bring it to shore. Most of the catch are Scallops, Squids and Shrimps as well as smelts Anchovy Fish that are used to make Vietnamese Fish sauce. After being there 3 times, this was the first time we learned about scallop processing, my favorite seafood. Did not know what scallop shells look like?

Women along the shore were doing piece work extracting the scallops, 50 cents/kg to open and discard the shells which form "mountains" on the beach.  Then the dealers weigh their buckets of scallop flesh that gets sold to restaurants and frozen food plants. There are others cleaning all sizes of squids and fish and sell it by weight.  There were women carrying 2 containers of gasoline, about 15 liters each, from the road to the shore,  50 cents/trip/2 jugs on their shoulders (I checked but there were no shoulder pads!) Then from the shore, the men would carry those big jugs out to the boat to deliver gasoline to bigger boats that anchored further out. Probably needless to mention that the smell at the harbor is not for the faint hearted.

After another lengthy bike ride we reached Hon Rom, had lunch at a beach resort for locals, not one tourist in sight. Le ordered about 40 Scallops for less than $4, BBQ'd in the shell by an old lady walking the beach; plus 5 giant shrimps. To make it short, after beer, ice coffee, boiled peanuts, sweets and more we had a swim.

We continued our trip to giant white sand dunes next to a lotus lake. The white sand is odd as most everywhere else the sand is red. The drive back was hard as we were tired and full of sand as we encountered several mini sandstorms.

Another wonderful ride in Mui Ne!