Russian beaches

Nha Trang, Vietnam

We arrived at 6am at the station in Nha Trang. The corridors played a weird local style of music 20 minutes before the stop. Our CEO came to wake us up. Soo tired. A bus took us from the train to the hotel, where our rooms weren’t due to be ready until 11. They had a spare room with some bunks in it, which some of the group quickly took up. I snoozed on the couch until our CEO took us to breakfast, at a restaurant along the beach. It was a very modern place, lovely bar area, and served very western dishes – like my eggs benedict, mango smoothie, and I also ordered a Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk to get a taste of the famed beans here. The eggs were paired with asparagus and parma ham, very strong flavours, but it worked so well. Yum! The bill was quite expensive for Vietnam, and I found that for the whole town. There is an island owned by Russians nearby, and the whole town was filled with Russian tourists. We surmised that they spent a lot of money here and hence the prices on everything were higher than usual. A couple of girls got their room before ours, so we crashed their shower and freshened up. The others went to the beach, but I decided no more sun, and stayed in the room for a nap. Dinner was at an Italian restaurant. One of the guys ordered chicken parmigiana expecting Australian style schnitzel with topping. Instead he got a kind of moussaka lasagne thing in a hot pot. Oops. The next day, I slept too late and missed breakfast. So I went to get brunch and ended up having poached eggs on toast, reading a book I bought in Cambodia about the Khmer Rouge. I went back to the hotel to pack up and checkout and caught up with a couple of girls from the group, so we went for afternoon tea, and sat sipping iced mochas and talking until it was time to meet the group for dinner. After dinner, we got some snacks and then got a bus to the train station for our overnight train… Again. This train was a little older, but we were used to the idea now.