Mui Ne

We decided to take a day trip to a little town on the coast called Mui Ne. This daytrip ended up being 3 days long because of inclement weather, but Mui Ne is now our 2nd favorite town in Vietnam. We had such a good time. It’s a fishing/beach town. Our first day we had a little bit of trouble because the bus we took dumped us at a hotel that we chose not to stay at because they wanted to keep our passports until we left. We have learned never ever let them keep our passports because they then use it as collateral for payments, and they can make up any payments they want. When we refused to hand them over, the woman refused to rent us a room. So we grabbed our bags (which we had already put in the room) to go. That resulted in a glass ashtray breaking. Then two things happened. The man came in the room and said we didn’t have to give them our passports, and we could still stay there (great!), and we had to pay for the ashtray (what?!). The cost of the ashtray was about $1 so I gave it to him, but we weren’t very keen on staying there anymore so we decided to leave. We found a guy who gave us a ride on his motorbike to a different place, which wasn’t much less but was really dirty. We refused and started trudging back the way we came (they only give one-way rides!) when another motorcyclist offered to take us to a different hotel. It was on the way anyway so we stopped in and it was a really quiet clean place. We were so excited. It was so cheap too!
The next day we went to the beach because we knew it was going to storm. We were not disappointed! We were swimming in the waves for a while and Dave was playing soccer and throwing these 2 little kids in the waves when the rain began. The kids immediately took off, but we stayed and played. The storm got worse and the rain was cold and painful. We finally got out of the water and hid under a grass umbrella and then went back to our room to take a hot! shower. Hooray for hot water!