Vietnamese Interlude

 

It was a beautiful sunny day with temperature at 28C. We are in the bay facing Nha Trang. Vietnamese tenders have started coming to the ship and are lifted into position by the metal arms which are normally reserved for our lifeboats. From the ship we can see beautiful long beeches, and a number of attractive buildings of distinct French colonial architecture, above them is a giant ferris wheel. There are also modern plush beach hotels. Further forward we can see a city a modern city of white high rises. I imagine a lot of our passengers will simply head to the beach, while others go on cultural tours. Albina and I have put ourselves down for the rickshaw event, partly for Albina’s sake, as it is the one with the lowest amount of walking. 

 

Just before we reached the Neptune Theatre for our meeting, I suddenly developed an awkward nose bleed. I fled to the nearest loo and pressed paper towels with cold water to control it. By the time I emerged the whole group had gone downstairs to be ferried to the coast. We made our way down and submitted our landing application sheets to be stamped by Vietnamese Immigration who were actually on the vessel in their olive-green uniforms. We were not given our passports. These were still being swapped between the Borealis immigration staff and the Vietnamese.

 

Borealis started to ferry passengers to the jetty at Nha Trang with its own lifeboats. These are covered carriers each capable of taking 150 passengers.  Once you are at sea level, away from our cabin on Deck 6, you suddenly see how choppy the waters really are. The lifeboats were floating up and down like yoyos. I have to say that watching the slow progress as some 7 boats were slowly being loaded, with 2 boats at a time, made me despair. So many frail passengers had to be literally lifted individually into these boats and nobody was able to get on without some assistance from the crew. All in all, it took nearly half an hour to load one boat. If the ship, God forbid, were ever to founder we would be left with only several half manned lifeboats bobbing along the water as the Borealis went under.

 

Again, for Albina’s sake, we chose the tour that required least walking. We took the coach to one of the town squares and each of us was seated jn an individual cycle powered rickshaw. If was an enjoyable and original way of being introduced to a city of half a million which boasts a sizeable market and a beach. We did not get on to the beach, but it looked pristine and white, and not too busy. Nha Trang is a spa town with a seaside, a sort of Vietnamese Brighton, but with sand rather than pebbles on its beach, and no piers jutting into the sea. However, it had a similar atmosphere of being largely an amusement park, mainly for Vietnamese visitors, with plenty of modern hotels dotted along the esplanade with its palm trees, and good quality beach shops. We drove around in these rickshaws for nearly an hour passing through elegant and wide tree lined avenues, around public squares with socialist realist statues and passing the occasional Buddhist temple or Catholic Church. Every major building and most toad junctions displayed the red national flag of the country.There were not many cars and the main method of transport apart from our fleet of rickshaws, was motorbikes. There were only occasional traffic lights, which our rickshaw drivers patently ignored, while at busy junctions or on roundabouts we all criss-crossed each other with gay abandon, avoiding collisions purely by the quick reaction of all the road users, and by a generous use of the horn. Perhaps not as loudly and endless as in India, but certainly in sharp contrast to the quiet sedate road traffic in Singapore. We crossed the mouth of the River Kai and stopped just on the other side of the bridge. It had been both an exhilarating and a quite comfortable experience. Here the coaches picked us up. We were driven to the Dam Market to do some shopping.

Personally, I would have preferred visiting the eighth century Po Nagar Towers. Vietnam is another ancient civilization peeking through into the modern world under Communist rule. The Towers were part of an ancient Hindu agrarian civilization called the Champa Kingdom. They believed in the existence of a Mother of the World, responsible for the earth, the trees and for rice, and she taught people how to cultivate the land. A very practical soft mother earth kind of belief. We caught a glimpse of the towers when crossing the Kai Bridge, but not near enough to even get a picture. However, I cannot complain as we had been shown what was on the schedule for our tour.

We returned to the ship following another prolonged transit from jetty to ship with our bouncing lifeboats. As some of the older frailer passengers were simply picked up by the crew and plonked unceremoniously into the boat, a hearty cheer rose up from those already in the boat. The whole operation of getting into the boat, transiting a mile or so to the ship, and then disembarking must have taken one hour. And we were one of seven such boats. However, it was all endured by the passengers in good humour.  Bolearis departed as the dark of the evening drew in. The whole coastline came out in lights and the giant ferris wheel winked at us by displaying a very colourful light show which dominated the coast.

 

I spent most of my free time trying to research for the lecture on Phileas Fogg that I may have to give later on in the cruise. The problem with this research is that with an infrequent interlink link I can count on getting the information only intermittently.

I took a break for dinner, this time with Albina, and made for an early night. We had to put our watches forward again by one hour.