Well this isn’t the planned port we had on the original schedule. This is because the pier was closed in our original port and this port was a Vietnam Navy Base. The roads into the base don’t even exist on maps, yet they are very nicely paved highways.
Princess provided us a “free” shuttle to Wyndham Grand PE Paradise Resort about a 30 minute ride away. With 95% of the way on the base highway and no other vehicles on the road.
The resort was nice BUT Princess had arranged that we could use the resort pool for $5.00 a head in cash or we could also have access to the beach as well for $15.00. What they didn’t say was the beach was a 2 mile walk away with no transport there or back.
Also there had been a local tour company setup to get us to Cam Ranh for another $30 a head in cash return. There was no haggling here.
One of our group saw a different cab company pull in and he quickly went and asked what he would charge us. For the 7 of us he would charge us $100 for the 5 hours and stay with us and take us places. Well it didn’t take us long to load that car.
The first stop was a Church where we paid a few dollars for the group to go into. As I get out of the car I looked at my GPS and low and behold there was a Geocache about 50 meters away. Off I went to find this cache. What I found was a message in a bottle. The paper was like parchment paper and a nice tie around it. I signed the log and carried on into the church. I gave it a favourite point because how neat it was. In the 2 years it has only had 16 cachers sign the log.
The church was very nice inside.
Christ the King Cathedral Nha Trang
Christ the King Cathedral Nha Trang
Geocache out there in a tree
From here it was a trip to a nice Temple, the Long Sơn Pagoda. When I got there I found out it was 157 stairs to the top which I declined to go up in the heat and humidity. I sat there and watched many people attempt to the climb up only to come back down looking broken and exhausted.
Long Sơn Pagoda
From here it was a short drive to a Market that pretty much sold anything from stinky food to clothes and kitchen supplies. I know one of our group managed to get a name brand T-Shirt which he haggled down to $3.00. He said back home the same shirt sells for $80.00 and it is made in Vietnam.
After the market it was food time. We went to a Seafood Market. You want Shark then go over to the tank and pick out your shark. Want eel same thing. You name it they have it. We ordered a few dishes to share along with a few beer. Now this is where things get interesting. The beer was listed as $18,000 VND a bottle of Saigon Beer. Now when you convert that out it comes to 71 cents a bottle. What was I thinking drinking Coke back in Saigon at $2.00 a can.
Pineapple Shrimp fried rice
My cheap beer. It was drinkable
Once we finished here it was back to the resort to board the shuttle bus back to the ship.
The interesting thing was our group was in the back of the Bus when one of the ladies snapped a photo of the Guards at the check point. A minute or so later we had 2 Army and 1 Navy personnel board the bus and came back to said lady asking for her phone. She had to delete the photos she took and then we carried on.
The funny part was the next day when I thought to myself you know that photos are not truly deleted until 30 days later to give you time to think about it. I saw the lady the next day and said hey did you check your trash folder for your photos that got deleted. She said gee funny thing I thought about this earlier and yes I did and the photos were there so I restored them.
The following is some of the photos I shot from the ship leaving. We were told by our taxi driver that there are suppose to be 6 submarines here, we only saw 2.
Dry Dock?
Just sitting there moored to a ball.
ship building
