Jan 24th 2012, Nha Trang, Sampo

Ah, travelling. You work your butt off to make money so that once you get on holiday, you can fly away to sleep bad, wake up early, sit on a bus, sweat and get dirty. Before our trip, several people mentioned that we must be nuts if we're really trying to see four countries in five weeks, cause we'd have to be constantly on the move. The thing is, this is the only way I know how to travel. Even the best places start to seem a little dull after a couple of days, and I soon yearn to be back on the road. Only this time, moving has mostly involved buses that are slow and hot and move on bad roads. In four weeks I've clocked about 57 hours of bus travel. Add to this 8 hours on a boat and maybe 24 hours on trains, and you get nearly 90 hours of moving from one place to another.



So once we got out of the bleeping, honking madness that is Saigon and arrived on the calm beaches of Nha Trang, we were soon quite convinced that we'll be spending the rest of the trip by the sea and not on another bus. To keep the pace going though, we first planned to move on from Nha Trang after a couple of days and find another interesting town or some guesthouses on the nearby islands. However, it turned out that there aren't many options that don't involve long bus rides or five star holiday resorts, so we decided to stay put and relax in Nha Trang. Which wasn't a bad idea after all.



We arrived here on Sunday, which, as Esa explained, was the New Year's Eve for the Vietnamese. So we got to celebrate New Year for the second time in three weeks. However, in comparison to Finland, Tet feels more like Christmas than New Year: most people take the whole week off, streets and restaurants are lavishly decorated with Tet-related stuff, and instead of getting excessively drunk and shouting around the streets like we do, the Vietnamese spend their New Year's Eve having dinner with their families. It wasn't all quiet though, since at midnight thousands of people, locals as well as tourists, gathered by the beach to watch a pretty impressive fireworks show that lasted for nearly 15 minutes. As soon as the show was over, the crowd dispersed and people jumped on their scooters to get away. Strange.



Nha Trang is a pretty traditional tourist beach town with the usual tourist bars, tourist restaurants, tourist shops and tourists, as well as locals that want you to turn your wallet inside out. So, in short, not really my kind of place. However, with our trip nearing its end and knowing what's expecting us back home, I can't really complain about being able to swim and relax in a comfortable climate. Besides, in spite of it being Tet, Nha Trang really isn't crowded at all – I guess the holidays are long gone for most westerners. In addition, there are pretty cool things to do, like diving for example.

This town is full of diving agencies that offer all sorts of packages. If you aren't a certified diver, you can still do introductory dives with an instructor, just to see what you're missing. We went shopping around different agencies on Monday, starting from the bigger ones, but ended up booking our excursion with a private entrepreneur called Mark Scott, a huge ex-rugby player from Texas. For some reason Peltsi had less interest in getting wet so he decided to skip this one, but this morning me and Esa got up at 6.30 to go do some diving.



We took a boat to one of the islands nearby, where there are some pretty nice corals and shallow waters, and Mark showed us how to use all the equipment. Pretty soon it was time to jump in the water. Now, diving is something that I've always wanted to try but never had the chance, so this was a dream come true. However, the first moments were a bit chaotic. Even breathing felt so strange that I had a hard time concentrating simultaneously on the pressure in my ears or on emptying the water from my mask, while trying to be aware of my depth. Esa had done a similar introductory dive once before and had less problems getting adjusted. By the end of our first dive I was feeling a lot more comfortable, and the second dive we did was just pure bliss. Esa, quite aptly, compared diving to driving a car: you need to get used to handling the equipment before you're able to watch your surroundings.

Because the rainy season apparently ended just a couple of weeks ago, underwater visibility wasn't as good as it could be, but we saw really cool corals and all kinds of things living on them, and plenty of fish, of course. In short, it was one of the coolest things I've done. I think we both got a little bit hooked: during the second dive, the 45 minutes that we spent underwater felt more like 5, and left us wanting for more. I'm definitely going to do the open water diver course sometime in the future.

Some words about practical issues. As you all know by now, Olli is (was) our official Minister of Lottery. Right after we had left him in Siem Reap, we realised that we had made a terrible mistake: how were we going to select a new minister, if the old minister wasn't there to organise a lottery? After a long discussion and plenty of desperation, we came up with a solution.

As on our previous trips, we have set up a ”House Wallet”, in which everyone puts some money and which we then use to pay for common goods together. It's a good way to avoid all the hassle that comes with paying separately or trying to remember who paid what. We take turns to carry the House Wallet. As it is an important responsibility, we decided to make it even more important by making the carrier of the House Wallet also the acting Minister of Lottery, so now we've all had to do some, err, lotterying. By pure coincidence, I alone inherited Olli's second job, namely being the Minister of Numbers, who's in charge of managing and recording possible inbalances in the House Wallet. Having to take on these burdens has really made us appreciate the great work Olli has done for us in the past. Wish you were still here!



I think we'll head to the beach now. In the next two days we'll probably be visiting the islands, eating and swimming. At first we wanted to go back to Saigon on Saturday evening, but due to the end of the Tet holidays all the trains were full, so now we have tickets for Friday morning. Until then, I think we'll just relax. Time goes too fast when you do things.