My husbands’ job brings me back to Vietnam this year (August 2025), the country we called home 30 years ago. After more than 24 hours of travel we land in Nha Trang, where we will stay for 5 days before embarking on on a two week motorbike trip with two extra stops in Nha Trang, one after the first week and a one before flying back home.
We stay at the Vinpearl beachfront, a 45 storey high hotel, where we spend quite some time getting up and down with the elevators. Having that many people together in one big breakfast room in the morning leads to a really noisy and busy breakfast experience… On weekend days the noise of really loud beach parties made sleeping impossible in our sea-view room, so we asked for a city-view room on those days, both rooms are exactly the same and very spacious. (Ask for city-view rooms with the lowest uneven numbers) The hotel is next to the beach and features a pool and for the price of a room here you can’t even get a hotel room in Belgium.
Vietnam has been growing fast these last thirty years and this has led to some really wonderful things but also some big fuck-ups. Nha Trang is a strange place, a lot of ugliness, noise, many Russians and tacky tourists spots and it feels like Ibiza Vietnamese style during the weekends. I got overwhelmed by the noise and crowdedness at first but slowly the place started to grow on me. There is the charm of the strolling families along the beach boulevard in the evening when it cools down a bit, the wonderful food, the friendliness of the people and the sometimes crazy (but often mostly ugly) architecture and messiness of the urbanization…
We had some wonderful food in Nha Trang: two very tasty dinners at Nom Nom and one at La Nha restaurant where I tried the buds of sweet potato which turned out to be a really tasty green vegetable and had calamansi ice tea which is a crossover between a kumquat and mandarin. Our favorite place was definitely Mam restaurant, which has a beautiful interior and serves refined Vietnamese dishes. They even offered us a complimentary dessert on our third visit. I took a solo dinner at the cute little cafe Atelier and had lunch with a Banh Mi Dalat style at the Cui Banh Mi shop. Banh Mi is a small filled baguette, a popular Vietnamese street food dish. Also worth mentioning is the Nha Hé coffee shop which is a popular place to hang out with a really cute shop on the ground floor. Halfway our walk to the museum of Oceanography we made a stop at Artisan café and eatery for a really nice light lunch.
On my first morning I walked the 4 km to the Po Nagar Cham temple. The temple was founded before 781 and is dedicated to Po Nagar, a Hindu goddess who slayed a buffalo demon. There was a demonstration of some traditional music and dance, and a small museum. The temple grounds can get very busy with many tourist busses stopping for a visit. On my walk there I passed the statue of Alexandre Yersin, Bac Si, a doctor during the French colonial periode in the 19th century when Vietnam was still called Indochina. When I dropped the name Yersin to my husband in the evening he immediately answered that he was the founder of the first Pasteur institute in Vietnam here in Nha Trang and that Yersin also discovered the bacillus that causes de Bubonic Plague commonly known as the Black death and is named after him; the Yersinia Pestis.
So the next day I visited the Museum dedicated to Yersin adjacent the Pasteur institute, a 2 km walk from the hotel. The museum is small but informative with some really peculiar items on show like Yersin’s microscope, a large telescope, a 19th century calculator and a ‘rastel’ that was used to disinfect letters without opening them by perforating them with a tool that resembles a waffle iron. Yersin is also credited with founding the hill town of Dalat we will visit on our motorbike tour.
I then walked to the Nha Trang Christ the king cathedral built in 1928 by the French in neo-gothic style, probably one of the few examples of gothic architecture in Vietnam. Catholicism was introduced by the French in mainly Buddhist Vietnam. The church is built in concrete and painted to resemble a brick structure.
On my third day I walked the 3 km to Long Son pagoda. The walk took me through the old small winding streets of Nha Trang where the railroads tracks still run through residential areas and inhabitants have to be careful when stepping out of their houses. The original Long Son temple was built in 1886 but was destroyed by a cyclone in 1900 and rebuilt on its current location. It was again badly damaged during the Vietnam war but restored in 1971. Just behind the main building you find a large marble statue of a lying Buddha. Above the temple a large seated white concrete Buddha statue on a giant lotus is erected on the site of the original temple. The 24 m high statue is the tallest Buddha statue of Vietnam.
On the last day before our motorbike tour we walked to the Museum of Oceanography 3,5 km South of Nha Trang centre. We accidentally walked past a slum area where the fishermen live who go out every evening to catch fish and seafood for the many hotels and restaurants of Nha Trang. Their makeshift homes look out onto the megalomaniac Vinpearl amusement park on one of the islands. What a huge contrast!! The museum was in fact a waste of money. The skeleton of a humpback whale in the entrance hall was actually the only part that didn’t disappoint and we could have seen it without buying a ticket. The other exhibitions and aquariums were really sad and there were some coral sharks and turtles in ridiculously small pool.
Nha Trang is a very walkable city but when the heat gets too much a Grab taxi is a great alternative. Grab is the Asian Uber, convenient, cheap and reliable. You just have to download the app, and you can either pay by credit card through the app or cash directly to the driver. We bought a Viettel sim card which has great coverage at the start of our stay at the Viettel store in Nha Trang. After been given the wrong sim card at the airport in Hanoi last year and having to buy a new one at the Viettel store I chose to buy (an eSim) at the official Viettel store in Nha Trang this time.
chefmaison 