I was up and ready to go just after 7am, breakfast had been waiting for me, and I had even got a knock at the door just in case I was not up, got to love my hotel, best in Vietnam, in fact maybe the whole trip so far, so if you’re in Nra Trang stop at the Phong lan Orchid hotel, it’s off one of the main streets so is pretty quiet to. Bus to pick me up was supposed to be there at 7:50am it arrived at 8:05am not to bad really only 15minutes late, can’t complain in Asia with that.
Jump on the bus and chatted with some of the others on there a few people were doing the open water course and there was also a family and one other guy who ended out being my dive buddy for the day. Sean was his name a Canadian guy, the crazy bugger had got his license in Canada, that must have been cold.
We arrived at the boat and all jumped on then it was off to get wet. Now I always thought Asia was supposed to have warm waters, but it seems I was sadly mistaken, it gets a bit cold under the deep blue sea, at least we had a nice day and the water was not to ruff. After the usual boat rules, we found out who our dive master was going to be, Katrina was mine and Sean’s divemaster for the day. I let Katrina know I had a special mouth piece which she seemed happy to put on for me. 15 minutes later she pops back out with a different mouth piece and explained that my one had inadvertently been thrown over the side. As you can imagine I was not very impressed but it was done now so tried their mouth piece which fit but not really that well. Good start. They did say they would replace it and they would be able to get by the end of the next day.
Once at the site we geared up and over we went, remembered all I needed to which was good, the mouth piece that I was given was a bit big and caused my mask to continuously fill up, good practice on my under water skills. The corral was not really that great and I would have to say that the first dive site was not as good as Ko Tao in Thailand. The reef was very damaged, and because of over fishing you don’t really get to see that many big fish. Still it was fun being out there. I did get a bit cold towards the end but we did spend quite a bit of time under 10m which seemed to be were the thermal layer was.
After a very nice lunch we were back in the water again, I had tried to get another wetsuit to go over the top but they would not give me one the swines, luckily for me we were mostly in about 10m of water so it was still warm. It was quite different on the boat as well, last time I had to do everything, change tanks, etc, this time I got out of the water and BCD, tank and everything was removed for me all I had to do was stand there and then walk off and get food. I like this sort of diving.
I was meeting up with Zach and Elise as we wanted to go on the gondolas that went out to a island just off the coast, we did not know how much it would cost and what was on the other side. Once we were back on dry land I headed off to the gondola, it was not much of a walk but it was incredibly hot. I meet up with Zach as Elise had headed back to their room. It was 300 000dong but this also got us into the rides at the theme park, we did not really know what to expect so we went for a look.
The ride over is pretty impressive really, the gondola runs about 100foot off the water over to the island, it was a real laugh once on the island, we jumped on rides and watched movies, I only saw a couple of other western tourists there, this is all set up for the Vietnamese tourist which is really cool to see. After we had spent around 3 hours there it was time to head off, the clouds were building and it was looking like rain again that night.
That night we all meet up and had dinner again it was looking like we were all going to be heading north together, I had two more dives the next day and Zach, Elise, Mike and Katrina were going snorkeling, so we would meet up later and discuss the next days ride.
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