Week 11: New Year - No breaks (maybe some)

With 2018 drawing to a close it is generally a time for self reflection upon your achievements and growth throughout the year and maybe if our due date for the magazine wasn't on new years eve I would have been able to do that.

We had planned a trip to Mui Ne to celebrate the new year and so the preceding days was a mad dash to get everything done in time before leaving for what we thought would be a relaxing seaside break.

I finished the feature article prior to leaving and it was hard. Researching and writing an article on student mental health (or the lack of it) can be draining enough as it is but the mental strain was compounded by the fact that I had recently learnt about the suicide of someone I knew back home and the breakdown of my relationship at the current time. Anyway I gritted my teeth and finished it.

We left for Dalat on friday the 27th. You can read about my first trip there here. This time it was even more rainy and it definitely made the city which I had previously found endearing seem a lot A LOT less endearing. I don't think there was a single break in the rain. Despite that we visited some new places I hadn't seen previously such as the Datanla Falls and the Clay tunnel park. An attraction which continues the tradition of so many of Dalat's attractions by being weird as fuck.

After two nights we escaped the weather and headed for the coast to Mui Ne famous for beaches, sand dunes and.... well I guess that's about it.

The bus ride there was extremely scenic but unfortunately our bus had a very strange window tint which cut our visibility to that of a severe cataract sufferer. The soundtrack was really good though with bus driver playing the greatest pop hits of the 80s, which is incredibly uplifting.

Mui Ne is an ok place but I was honestly just glad to be somewhere with a beach and my friends to see out 2018. The dunes are worth seeing, however our "sunrise tour" probably wasn't so worthwhile. At any touristy destination around Mui ne you can expect hidden costs everywhere so just be wary, nothing is free.

New year's eve was fun thanks to our amazing group of friends and the happy craziness of the locals, Mui Ne itself had very little in the way of celebrations. No fireworks or anything.

For the first day of the new year we filled in time at the temples and beaches before our long bus ride home to Saigon.

But in Vietnam not even a bus ride is an uneventful affair and around 2 am in the middle of nowhere our bus flattened a local on his scooter. It's fair to say it messed everyone up a bit, particularly given that his body was lying metres away from our window.

Yeah so the last couple weeks of 2018 were pretty eventful. So eventful that I'm still trying to comprehend what has happened.

Thanks 2018, You've changed me a lot. 2019 show me what you've got.

-T