Ấp Thiện Long

So as we splashed out a bit on a hotel in In Vung Tau we spent half the price for our place in Mũi Ne and wow, it was really good!! We basically had a studio apartment to ourselves with a cooker and fridge. Unfortunately Mũi Ne is the Blackpool of Vietnam and as we arrived quite late it was near impossible to buy fresh fish and veg without it being completely overpriced. When we arrived we looked up what to do... Here was the first line of a blog "There's not a huge amount of tourism worthy things happening in this area if you aren't a committed Russian sun bather, or pot smoking kite surfer, and there aren't many places not littered with trash unfortunately, as you will have observed if you've made it this far in Vietnam." A tad bit annoyed that we didn't do a bit more research beforehand we decided to venture out and find some dinner. The whole town is an absolute rip off for really low quality food. After eating such yummy food so far we were super disappointed but we ate for eating sake and then tried to find some fruit for breakfast. There were a couple of fruit stalls and each one of them had a huge markup on the price. So we just went back to the flat quite disappointed to practise our Vietnamese and plan for our next 2 days in Mũi Ne. Everything we read had quite bad reviews and complained about tourism ruining the beautiful sites and litter being everywhere. We decided to just get on with it and do the site seeing anyway.

In the morning we got up at 5am to begin a mini adventure using local buses to Tacu Mountain. The town of Tacu was about 1.5 hours away, but there was no single bus that goes there so we used our broken Vietnamese and made it all the way there. Actually, I say broken Vietnamese but actually between the two of us we are actually getting quite good with our phrase structure and pronunciation! When we arrived we were starving so went to the nearest cafe and tried Bánh Mi op là, bread and eggs. We'll ya can't really go wrong and it was pretty cheap so all was good. It was about 9:15am and we began the hike up. It was already very warm so we were absolutely soaked in sweat in about 2 seconds. Honestly it's just vile how much one person can sweat here haha On the way up we saw a monkey, lots of butterflies and some interesting birds (not quite sure what they were) and unfortunately heaps of litter in parts. Fortunately it didn't ruin our trip! At the top was the largest reclining Buddha in South East Asia.

The way down was super hot and felt like it went on forever, but we eventually got down and bought a well deserved ice-cream whole waiting for our bus back. And what fun we had... One bus went straight past us and didn't stop, the next bus stopped but said he's not picking up passengers, finally after over an hour a 3rd bus came and we were on our way to Phẩm Theit which was the main town where all the locals lived near Mũi Ne, famous for being a seafood town.

We arrived in Phần Thiet just after 3pm and could have died of hunger so we headed straight for the sea food restaurants and the place was absolutely barron! Nothing looked open and barely any people were around. We've realised that in most of these smaller towns everything shuts between 2-4:30ish to get ready for the evening. So we wandered around the streets and headed to Coop Mart in hope we could get something from the supermarket. We aimlessly walked around and came away with nothing. Things were getting desperate... Luckily we had walked around for so long that places were now starting to open and we went to a small street selling lots of goodies! First we went for Bánh cảnh cảnh chả cá and it was the busiest tiny place on the street. So we happily sat and ate our fish soup. We then headed next door for a cà phê and wandered further down the street where we found a husband and wife making bánh tráng. Well we decided we didn't want the horrid food we had last night so might as well eat more! So we tried these too. That wasn't the end of it! We carried on and found a lady cooking Bánh xèo so we shared a plate of that too! We were so so full!! But it was our linner, so we didn't feel too bad hehe We then ventured back to Mũi Ne, bought some rip off fruit from the fruit stall and watched friends before having an early night.Read more