Day 107 – Mui Ne bike adventures and Tyler’s birthday.

I didn’t sleep very well so didn’t join them for the early morning activities but joint them for second breakfast at 9am. The curtains don’t really do anything in this hostel so when the sun rises about 5.30, that’s what time you wake up. We discovered at breakfast that our new friends had had pretty much every meal in the popular family restaurant since they’ve been here and why wouldn’t you when it’s right on the beach front and is the cheapest place to eat in the whole town. It’s even the cheaper to buy a bottle of water here than it is in the shop next door to us.

After breakfast we hopped on the bikes and went to visit fairy springs This place is made of sand and the colours are just amazing. We trekked through it for about half an hour before finding a waterfall and then walking back to the bikes. 

Our main excursion for the day was to find the Big Buddha at Ta Cu Mountain. We thought it was closer than it was, after just over an hours worth of driving and asking many different people for directions we had arrived! It was a bit more expensive than we thought it was going to be but seeing as we had now come all this way we obviously had to go in. It was 120,000 dong for the cable car and then another 20,000 just to enter the place, so it was only £4. We got in our cable car, which was quite cool as it took us up and over the mountain. 

The views were amazing but we didn’t realise as we got out of the cable car we still had to walk another 100m or so up to the Big Buddha. It was quite a good work out and they’re not lying when they say it’s big! It’s called Thich-Ca-Nhap-Niet-Ban and is 49 metres long and is the largest reclining Buddha in Vietnam.

When we left here we made the long journey back to Mui Ne through rush hour traffic and obviously went for dinner in the popular family restaurant as it was Tyler’s birthday after all!

Day 104 – Nha Trang Big Buddha.

We had a nice lie in, which was nice after the couple of early starts. We didn’t really have a lot planned for the day so I looked at my list of things to do and one of them was to go and see the Big Buddha called Long Son Pagoda. I googled and found out the walk should take around half an hour and there was a so called shopping centre on the way so we could grab lunch in the food court there.

Well, online it said it had a cinema and it was 5 floors so I was expecting something bigger than what we turned up too. It was smaller than Debenhams in Palmerston road, just to give you some scale. We still ate there in ‘Jollibee’, which is one of Vietnam’s fast food restaurants. This features mostly fried chicken that comes with rice or chips. It was alright, but not really the food court I had in mind.

From here the walk to the Buddha was only about 5minutes. I’m always impressed when seeing a Buddha statue in Asia because they are SO big, like stupidly big and they’re always really high up somewhere. We had to climb a fair few stairs to get to the top. We chilled up there for a bit before heading back. We decided to walk to the beachfront and go that way back to the hostel instead. By the time we got back it was nearly dinnertime so we went to Trip Advisor’s number 4 called Lanterns. It was absolutely packed in there but lucky for us there was one table ready for us to take. The food was better than yesterdays but it’s lower down which doesn’t make sense.