No Diving!

Heavily researched for this trip to Vietnam, was the best places to scuba dive and then making the opportunity to fit in with our itinerary.

I knew a dive out of Con Dao island, of the coast Hoi An. Perfect, I was excited to dive in the seas off Vietnam. With further research, I had chosen the dive company I was going with and booked a spot a few days ago. How beautiful it would be as you see from the image below.

This could have been me

Alas, it wasn't to be. The night before I get notice that the government had shut down any boats going to Con Dao island due to rough seas. I was devastated! My one and only opportunity to dive here had been taken away from me. But as we say in diving 'safety first - if it doesn't feel right, don't do it'. So I took on that philosophy instead and made we made a new plan for the day.

We decided to do similar to the day before and drop a pin on google maps and drive and see where the road takes us. We take a detour to check out another coastal strip and end up at the harbour from where the boats leave to go to Con Dao including the dive boats. How ironic that we happen to come across the dive boat that I was meant to be on.

Tiger Fish Dive Boat

I'm the car park we find the this dinky little fire truck. Not too sure how effective it is.

Kev's dinky fire truck

Continuing on our travels, we ride through quiet villages but as we got closer to one we could hear very loud music playing through a bad PA system. As we approached we saw beautiful decorations at the entrance with a notice board announcing the wedding.

We had come across wedding preparations previously with before photos of the prospective wedding couple being shot in idyllic locations. The bride and groom would be wearing western style wedding attire then on the actual wedding day they would wear traditional Vietnamese wedding clothing. In the image below you can see enlarged prints from the photoshoot they had earlier.

Vietnamese Wedding

Further on, in a village we came across a large war cemetery. From the dates we determined that these were soldiers or comrades who lost their lives during the Vietnam or as it is know here, the American War. Using google translate, we were also able to identify graves of 'unknown soldiers'. We tried to research why this cemetery was in this particular location but with no luck. We thought maybe there was a significant battle that took place here, with a great loss of life, but not sure.

Today ended with an amazing meal at a little street side restaurant that was family run. Our favourite were the scallops, real scallops still attached to the shell and they we so sweet. We are also loving the fresh springs rolls which are different every time we have them. The total of tonight's meals was 320,000dong = 20.00AUD. So very cheap and delicious.

Tonight we found a cute little cocktail bar that only opens at nights. It runs out of a van that unfolds to this bar. The open air bar has seats made from old bus seats along with log stumps positioned around a fire. Not sure why we needed a fire tonight, it did created atmosphere. Notice yet another beer brand!

That was all for today which ended up being full of surprises.

xoxo

Donna & Kevin