Spending All Day At The Beach, But What to Do At Night?

Mui Ne is a sleepy little beach town, and the waves, the wind, and the sporadic sun but not too fierce that it's hot make the beach a nice place to hang out for most of the day. But last night, I struggled to figure out what to do after the sun went down, because you can't really hang out at the beach when it's dark. I was kind of tired of traveling alone on my trip last night. It will be better when I'm in Ho Chi Minh City, and there are more people around, but here it's pretty quiet and deserted at night if you're not traveling with someone else. I ended up shooting pool with some Vietnamese people, one of them a motorcycle driver, at a bar down the road, and then going back to my room and reading my book, since the room had no television. The room that I stay at in Ho Chi Minh City will have a television. I will make sure of that.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw the scant sights that Mui Ne has to offer besides the beach. There was a very shallow stream that I could wade in pretty easily because the dirt in the bed of the stream was so soft. The tangy smell of fish sauce was in the air, because Mui Ne churns out the fish sauce, and the stream ran through a smallish canyon formed out of red sandstone, which crumbled pretty easily into fine red dust, so there were also some pretty large dunes of this red sand.

I also visited a larger red canyon near a beach at another part of the bay. It was a ten-minute hike from the road, and the narrow trail was the floor of this canyon. The end of this canyon and the top of the trail afforded a great view of the canyon and the ocean beyond. The last sight of note that I saw were these huge red sand dunes that were about five minutes from the canyon back towards the town of Mui Ne and where I was staying. The sand here was so fine, and some of the dunes were really tall that people could actually slide on sleds made of plastic down the dunes. I didn't, because I didn't really feel like getting sand everywhere in my clothes, and I feel like I've done the whole sledding thing before. But the views over the tops of the dunes were nice.

If I sound a little grumpy, it might be because I'm ready for the city again. The beach, surf, and books only go so far for me before I feel like doing something again. It's important for me to have the sense that there are many other people around me doing things, even if I know hardly any of those people.