Nha Trang

Nha Trang was surprisingly clean for a large city. I arrived very early in the morning, shortly after sunrise and the ocean looked beautiful. This is the first tropical beach I have seen. After checking into a hotel, my most expensive accomodation yet coming in at $8, I ventured out for breakfast, a sandwich that I took to the beach to eat. There I saw throngs of soldiers and university students hauling away debris left from the typhoon and heaving it into large piles. I approached to join in, although for all the hundreds of people cleaning there was nerie a westerner to be seen. Some university students took to me and told me they were actually just finishing, but I could come to the cafe with them and get some coffee. It turned out they were studying to be tour guides, and they agreed to drive me around on their motorbikes for the day. One in particular spoke very good English, knew quite a bit about the sights around town, and was very charismatic. The rest tagged along and enjoyed the adventure having never taken an actual "tourist" about the town before.

The next was making to be significantly less interesting when, late in the afternoon, I was picked up by a man on a motorbike with a girl her claimed to be his neice. We went back to his place and I ate with "the family." It consisted of about 6 local dishes and was all very good. Soon, a man took me to a room with a table set out for playing cards and taught me how one might cheat with the dealer at blackjack. It was a very long scam and I originally wrote out about a page of text to describe it, but alas it was just too much. Suffice it to say that involved convincing the victim that he would win... I think it was $30,400 split 2 ways between him and the dealer if the victim could only come up with the $400 that the dealer could not borrow from a friend. It involved tricky deckwork, and I am still not sure how he managed to deal me exactly 21, as I saw him shuffle the cards well. Also I am not sure where the hell they came up with $30,000 cash in $100 bills that looked perfectly legitimate. I told him that I could only withdraw a very small amount of money from the bank per week, which of course was a lie. He asked how much I did have. I pulled out a wad of cash, all sorted from large notes to small, and it amounted to $12, or about 220,000 Dong. The rest of my cash, amounting to around $150 was in a seperate pocket of my wallet that he would not have seen. I said that I had no part in this, as he was playing with his money, and I would not contribute anything to the pot. He told me he would do what he could and take me back to my hotel in the meanwhile, picking me up when he had gathered the money. The driver never returned. It was likely one of the most interesting I have had on this trip so far and I was glad to have participated and then got away unscathed.