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Our stay in Nha Trang for Christmas was pretty much as expected, albeit, much quieter than we thought it might be. The hordes of western tourists we anticipated did not materialise, in fact, it was downright quiet. Being downright quiet made our traditional walk on the white sand beach extremely tranquil other than the sound of waves crashing on the shore.

We made the most of it with Hugh and Catherine having a “traditional” English Christmas Eve Dinner…..several jugs of Bia Hoi followed by a curry…..excellent! Sadly, the only places offering anything near to a British Christmas Day Lunch were those that had a habit of playing very cheesy music.

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This could have been tolerated in support of a traditional Christmas but the volume that they tended to play the music was ear splitting ending all hopes of conversation, storytelling, reminiscing and sharing travel information. Instead we opted for our favourite Italian Restaurant and we weren’t disappointed…….an excellent evening was had by all. Take a look at the pics for the silly hats we bought in China and some of the gifts that we exchanged.

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Mick & Karen…..do the pictures bring back any memories?

Our highlight was seeing and speaking to our children, Leanne, Alex and Paul over Christmas via Skype. It still blows us away to know that you can talk to someone on the other side of the world for as long as you like for free…..now that’s technology!!

Congratulations to Alex for getting his job as Data Journalist for BBC World Service. One is very proud of one’s son working for Aunty Beeb.

Not much else happened in Nha Trang, we did a lot of planning for Sri Lanka plus our trip south via Mui Ne to Ho Chi Minh City to catch our flight. We had planned to stay in Nha Trang until after New Year but the new sound of Vietnam, “building”, moved in next door to our hotel with the demolition starting before 07.00 a.m. We decided to cut our losses and move early to Mui Ne on December 28th.

We do have one interesting story about Nha Trang. Changing money in banks can be as slick as you can image, sometimes less than 5 minutes, or it can be so tedious you cannot imagine. Up until now the longest time we had to spend changing money was in Yangshuo in China. Cheryl was trying to change a traveller’s cheque and must have signed 6 or 7 documents and took around 25 minutes. Changing money in Nha Trang for Neil proved even slower but without the document signing. The bank we chose had obviously not had much experience of traveller’s cheques so the girls had to follow process “by the book” so 55 minutes later, and 25 minutes after the bank had shut, we eventually walked out with our 10 million VND!!

We hope you all had a great Christmas and that the snow made it just that little bit more Christmassy than normal.