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Those were probably the main attractions of Nha Trang. There are a few museums (the Yersin Museum on Tran Phu Street, as well as an ethnic museum), an aquarium on an island, which isn't supposed to be anything special (Tri Nguyen Aquarium), and the Làng Nghề Trường Sơn Craft Village, but from the online pictures, none of it looks that interesting. There are also a few waterfalls, but we didn't want to visit them. A detour to Dalat, about 135 km or a three-hour drive away, would be a good way to make the stay even more interesting. The road there, however, is very winding, even according to the map. An overnight stay there is recommended. We'll see, maybe next time. We liked Da Nang better. There is more to see, the city has a quieter impression due to its larger area despite twice the number of inhabitants and above all, neighboring Hoi An is worth a visit. Tomorrow we're off to Thailand again. I hope you enjoyed the report.

Yesterday's meal at "Family Secret" was the best yet! Spinach cream soup with sun-dried tomatoes, scallops, skewers (lamb and pork), and delicious potato wedges. The owners are from Uzbekistan. Highly recommended.

In the evening, we went for Thai food at Ớt Hiểm Thai Cuisine. At first, we were told the chef was Thai. When we tried the food and were surprised by its taste, we asked about it: the chef had spent a month studying in Thailand. The restaurant is beautifully decorated. The Tom Yum was still ok, a bit sweet, like so many dishes in Vietnam. The Pad Krapow had the wrong basil, was apparently not prepared with oyster sauce and tasted sour. Laab Moo was also awful. There's no room for sugar in this dish! After our bad experiences with Thai food in Da Nang, Mrs. CO swore she would never eat Thai food in Vietnam again. Back to the bar street, where the girls were bored. Where we were sitting, the DJ was getting ready. This waitress weighed 30 kg at most.

For day 4, we had a temple and a monastery on our radar. It's about an hour's drive and costs 600k for the driver. The Tong Lam Son Temple Lot consists of a building, the large standing Buddha, and a cemetery. It can be skipped. Unfortunately, the large Thanh Son Monastery has been closed for some time, and a gardener or something similar refused to let us in. What a pity.

After enjoying Da Nang in Vietnam so much last year, Mrs. CO and I wanted to stop by Nha Trang. The Air Asia flight was leaving Don Mueang at 8 a.m., so we decided to drive to the airport and spend the night in a hotel. I chose the "12 The Residence Hotel & Apartment," a converted apartment complex. It looked very appealing, and at 900 baht, you couldn't go wrong, or so I thought. Unfortunately, the mattress was so hard that I could barely get out of bed the next morning. The pillows were too soft, which didn't contribute to a good night's sleep. For 200 baht a day, you can park your car underneath the building. Lobby: We woke up at 5:00 a.m., checked out at 5:30 a.m., and then waited 15 minutes for a Bolt taxi to arrive. The ride to the airport was about 10 minutes and cost 120 bt. Since it was Songkran festival, the airport was busy. Check-in only took 15 minutes, though, and immigration and security were also fairly quick. The flight took two hours. I exchanged some money at Cam Ranh Airport, which is 45 minutes from Nha Trang. I had a lot of USD. The exchange rate at the airport was 1:24000, online it was 24800-24900, and the local rates were around 25000-25750, which is pretty close to the mid-market rate. Some shops, spas, etc., have signs indicating that you can exchange USD and possibly other currencies. Larger bills yield better rates. I got a SIM card for 10 USD at the airport; all the counters there have the same prices and exchange rates. We took Grab to the hotel for 350k. There are a few taxi drivers who offered the trip for 300k. We booked the 5* Sea Soul Hotel through booking.com. There was a special (3 for 2 nights), so one night with breakfast and a sea view only cost about 1300 Thai Baht (6 nights: 6170k VND). The hotel is fairly new, well located (several bars/pubs, many restaurants, and massages nearby), and only a few hundred meters from the sea. You either have to leave your passport at the reception or pay 1000k VND as a deposit. This seems to be common practice at some hotels there.

Chicken cooked in a combination of red and green curry paste and coconut milk, on top of my veg mix.

You can spend an hour at the Museum of Oceanography. It's a mix of museum and aquarium, albeit fairly simple. The entrance fee is only 40k. It was busy on Saturday, which had the downside of loudly screaming children banging on the windows everywhere, and chicks with cell phones and extra flashlights were setting new selfie records, trying to capture every fish. What do you think is in this pool? Oh, turtles!

The Japanese garden was not that big, but still beautiful: The Ferris wheel doesn't start turning until 2 p.m. Mrs. CO wasn't so keen on it. It's said to be one of the 10 largest wheels in the world. View of the water park, which we didn't visit. There was a 10-minute 3D film. Actually, it was 4D, because there was also wind and spray, and the seats tilted in all directions. It wasn't for me, otherwise I would have become a Starfighter pilot. Mrs. CO must have had her eyes closed most of the time. As you can see, there wasn't much activity. We'd been here for four hours and were pretty exhausted in the 33-degree heat. So we decided not to wait several more hours for the evening shows (the Tata Show is supposed to be good, or the fountain show) and relaxed at the hotel. You can spend the whole day in the park, especially if you're a bit younger.

We spent the afternoon exploring the surrounding area. The city's landmark: Agarwood Tower Like in Da Nang, the beach is wide and many kilometers long. There are also toilets on the promenade that you can use for 10k. What if he suddenly has to brake hard?

We caught a good feed of mud crabs. PM

Visiting Nong Nooch Gardens for the umpteenth time.

Back in 2008, I spent a week in Snooky and hired a car and driver to have a gander along the coast all the way down to Kep. The only thing of interest really between Snooky and Kampot was the Elephant Mountains with the Bokor Hill Resort on top. I wanted to visit that but the Koreans were building a new road up the side of the mountains and turning Bokor into a casino resort so it was a no go area at the time. This was before the Chinese takeover of Cambodia, they were just starting to show up in Snooky, but there were no casinos or high rise buildings there yet. They'd built one fancy hotel on a small island and that was advertised for $2K/night. This was the road up to Bokor under construction at the time: I was interested to visit Kampot as I'd met a Belgian guy from another forum who lived there with his Khmer wife. Your photos make it look positively bustling and cosmopolitan compared with 2008. There were some foreign-owned bars near the river and I had a beer and lunch in one, the Rusty Keyhole, owned by a Kiwi couple. The whole place really was dead, I'd have gone out of my mind with boredom in a week living there. The Belgian guy clearly lived there because it was his wife's home town and he spent most of his time on the road, supposedly for business reasons but we'd once met up in the Pattaya Beer Garden and he didn't seem to be doing much business there. His main interest was getting me to show him The Windmill Club which he'd heard a lot about and he loved the hands-on nudity. I once mentioned as a joke that I might start a Gogo Bar in Kampot, and his Khmer wife declared me persona non grata after that, lol. Here's a few miscellaneous views of Kampot: Kep was a bit more lively and also more foreign-touristy. The main attraction, unless you were travelling onto Vietnam, was the local crab with pepper, which was OK but expensive for such a poor country. Here's a few random views: I'd spent a lot of time in Phnom Penh, Snooky and Koh Kong, where I'd almost married a gorgeous young Khmer bird, until her boyfriend had appeared from nowhere and told her he'd kill me if I ever contacted her again. Well, that was a mood breaker for sure, lol. I particularly liked Snooky with its old buildings and large, spread-out area, surrounded by half a dozen nice beaches and lots of countryside, and its laid-back attitude. In the early 2000's my favourite watering hole was the Fisherman's Den, a rooftop bar run by a Kiwi named Brian and his mate. The red light areas were slowly being closed down until, by my last visit in 2008, there was only one left on the hill. After 17 years away I'm sure I wouldn't recognise the place now, but I've got some very fond memories of it from my many trips between 2001 and 2008.

The glass tunnel is quite narrow...for both visitors and the rays.

More from the zoo: Most of the animals just dozed in the shade. The bird show was quite nice:

A few minutes drive further, these rocks are a popular selfie spot: the Hon Chong rocks. Also 30k entry. We only saw the Mountain Church from the outside because it didn't open until 2 p.m.

We continued to the Po Nagar Temple. Entrance fee was 30k.

Now the sightseeing begins: The first stop was the Long Son Pagoda. It's quite nice. Inside of the lower part of the Buddha figure there were a few wooden ornaments: The ladies were waiting for customers...for the restaurant.

In the evening, we wanted to go to a restaurant with a seafood buffet. We were late, and all the tables were taken. We didn't want to wait, so we couldn't try the line. We chose the Lousiane Brewhouse, which was also well attended. The beer was very good. The food, however, was sweet, like many dishes in Vietnam. The bowl was a duck stew that consisted almost entirely of bones. The fish was quite ok. An evening stroll along Bar Street. There were three bars where a few girls were sitting outside, waiting for customers. No idea how, where, or what to do with them. A few meters further to the left some very pretty girls were waiting.

We've probably all read about the Chinese takeover of Snooky and how it's nothing but casinos and high-rise buildings these days. This was the view of the town from Wat Leu, the temple up on the hill behind the town, back in 2005, though it's spread over such a large area that it's difficult to get it all in one photo. That's looking towards Occheuteal Beach and note the complete absence of anything high-rise, and the rest of the city to the right of the photo, over towards Victory Hill and the port area, was the same. I mentioned that I used to stay on Occheuteal Beach. Just behind it was a famous Snooky landmark, the Golden Lions traffic circle (that's a roundabout to us Brits). I took the left-hand snap back in 2005, and the town was much the same in all directions. Then a few months ago I was reading an article in The Times on the developments over the last decade or so in Cambodia and they included the photo on the right of what the Golden Lion traffic circle looks like nowadays. Call me a stick-in-the mud, but I much preferred it in the old days, though there's far more money sloshing around the place and I hope enough of it makes its way down to the ordinary Khmers.

Veggie omelette...

From here on, the regular admission ticket is required: The zoo:

Day 3: VinWonders Nha Trang is the new name for the former Vinpearl Land Nha Trang, an amusement park on a nearby island. If you want to go there, you should plan and prepare well. There's a large water park, gardens, a zoo, and many rides, although some were out of service. The shows have set times. You can buy the cheap tickets for the cable car and stay in the front area, which only has shops and restaurants. Not recommended. Tickets for the park, including the cable car, cost 950k, and for those over 60, 710k. However, many of the rides are no longer open to people over 50. A few attractions cost extra, like the zip line, which is usually fully booked or has long wait times. Otherwise, bring a hat, sunscreen, and good walking shoes; the area is very large. We took a Grab to the cable car station. On the way, the driver stopped at a friend's ticket booth. The prices were identical. We received the regular ticket for Mrs. CO as a card, and the discounted ticket for myself via WhatsApp. The Grab driver later handed us a 25,000k discount (he probably also received some commission). Let's go: The view back:

The afternoon was spent relaxing, and in the evening, we explored the nightlife and the night market. The rickshaws are all battery-powered. Street food: Night market:

The hotel's breakfast was very decent for the price range, although it was obviously geared toward Vietnamese and Chinese customers. There were also plenty of things for me, such as an egg station with a delicious omelet, plenty of fruit, cakes, and other items. There was also a good coffee machine.

Wanted to get away for songkran didn't realize they celebrated here as well but after 3 days it's over here. First visit to Kampot after seeing steady Eddie's video that he posted a while back it's been a place I've wanted to see. It's definitely very laid-back. A lot of expats have retired here after having conversations with a couple they think it's the best decision they've ever made they're really happy here I can understand why. I just can't believe how inexpensive things are. They have a transportation app here in Cambodia called Passapp. Here you can go from one end of town to the other in one of their rickshaws for about 75 cents. They do have a entertainment area down on the waterfront that's very nice but as far as girls and adult activity it's limited. While they do have quite a few small beer bars what's available is really appalling really bad. They also have a street that has five or six massage places but they look like Shacks ready to fall down. Hear a few photos from around town

Phillies A/C.......

We continued to the gardens. It's no comparison to Nong Nooch, but still worth seeing. The winter garden had air conditioning. We stayed there a little longer.🥶 The cactus section is very beautiful. I'll only include a few pictures here, otherwise it would be too boring.

Taken at the famous “Jeff Astle bridge” at Netherton near Dudley.

Bacon jalapeno cheesy french fries and some chicken nuggets That's All she wrote for tonight it was good enough Western food Western prices seven and a half dollars US. Not complaining felt it was worth it

Mind the gap in the Manila Metro

A/C......

Band playing last night upstairs... Sounded OK.....

^ Honestly have no idea how any bloke could find them attractive.

Monday 21st April 2025........02.00 hrs........Soi Buakhao...

My toy is the Forerunner 235. Only use it to track distance and to keep a gps log of what I ran. All the other bells and whistles on the unit and Garmin Connect I've turned off.

Handy little kitchen tool....

I just got back from the dentist,looks like two crowns but I have to see another dentist on 2/5. B1500 each,bargain!

You may recall that before my recent various outpatients visits to my local hospital, my GP had commenced a number of tests with a view to identifying which of my medications was causing me weekly bouts of diarrhoea. The Practice phoned me Thursday to arrange for me to visit again for yet another set of blood tests. The Receptionist asked me which was their doctor who started the recent tests. I had to respond that I did not catch her name as she was new to me at the Practice. "Oh", responds the Receptionist. "She was a trainee. Only with us for the week!" I had to laugh. So the fit female doctor who asked me was it OK if she could shove her finger up my arse was a Trainee! 🤣

A/C.......

The baggage handlers don’t have to throw him into the plane.

I didn't visit kep came straight to Kampot but all the roads that we took were fine no issues whatsoever it took 11 hours from Siem Reap but I took the sleeper bus and it was really comfortable I actually got hours of sleep while I didn't think I would each compartment is big enough for a 6-footer more than a 6-footer and you're going to be a little cramped. The busted stop a couple of times but I never got off because they had a toilet on the bus. It was a lot more comfortable than I thought it would be

A/C....