These personal blogs are (fairly) accurate depictions of my travel adventures, shenanigans, mishaps, inexplicable scenarios and awe-inspiring experiences. If you’d like slightly more helpful information about Vietnam to help plan your own trip, check out my guides. If you’re in for the tale, take a seat (I can be very wordy) and read on! And if you’d like real time updates of where I’m at and what I’m up to, join the newsletter for stories like this one direct to your inbox.
From Dalat we took a bus back to the coast, to Mui Ne, a town known for its sand dunes and kitesurfing. We booked a luxury room in a resort with multiple pools and a 50m walk to the beach, because in Vietnam that only costs $115 for a week. Our week at the luxury resort was very chilled. We discovered that there was very little food available anywhere near us, so we just sucked up the extra delivery cost and ordered very large meals with lots of leftovers. We tried to do lots of online work, but never made any sort of set schedule, so I don’t know how productive we really were. Our room had a projector rather than a TV, and it over heated and switched off after about an episode of anything, which at least meant we couldn’t get distracted by binge watching, but also meant we couldn’t get through a whole movie in one sitting. The pools were very nice, though very cold, and we put our toes in the sand at the beach across the road a couple of times.
Being so far out of town we decided to just book another couple of days in the tourist area of Mui Ne. Here our hotel was much less luxurious, but we were directly opposite a large food court with many delicious and varied options for incredibly cheap, with a really nice seating terrace with shade and comfy sofas. We decided this would be a nicer place to continue to get some work done than small busy cafes in Ho Chi Minh City, so we ended up extending here for another 5 days. We did get out and about a bit more here too, walking the entire sea front, visiting the fishing village, walking up the ‘fairy stream’ to a small waterfall, and spending some more time on the larger beach. And of course eating very, very well.
Our final stop on our 3 month Vietnam trip was Ho Chi Minh City. We’ve both been here a couple of times, so didn’t feel the need to do any tourism. Instead we tried out a couple of local breweries, and a few more cocktail happy hours at fun speakeasies. It was very humid here compared to everywhere else in the country, and the weather forecast suggested a week of rain, but after a huge downpour on the first day it was dry for the rest of the week. We still tended to venture out mostly just in the evenings when it was cooler, and spent most of our days in the AC at the hotel, enjoying how much good food we could order before we leave one of the cheapest countries in the world. Creed bought me a selection of brownies and cookies for Valentine’s day which we made our way through while binge watching Pushing Daisies.
Our departure day was the first day of the Lunar New Year, so throughout the week many flower displays and horse statues (it’s the year of the horse) were being put up around the city. We asked the tourist office if there were any particular events and he told us about the fireworks on the river on Sunday night at 11.45pm. While sitting by the river at about 11pm on Sunday we realised that there were very few people around and most of the people that had been enjoying the biggest flower displays had left. It didn’t really make sense for the fireworks to be on Sunday night when New Year’s Eve was Monday, and after a quick Google that we should have done previously we discovered that there had been a translation error and fireworks were indeed scheduled for Monday night, at midnight for 15 minutes, not 15 minutes before midnight. So on Monday we went back to the river at around 11pm and this time it was packed with groups sitting on cardboard on the floor waiting for the show. We watched a bit of a lion dance with some daring acrobat dancing on top of a tall pole, and then found a spot to sit and wait for midnight. The fireworks turned out to be fantastic, with a main show across the river, echoing and reflecting off the sky scrapers on the other side, while another skyscraper further down from us had its own fireworks going off from the roof and even out of the sides. It was loud and bright and colourful and the crowd made lots of oohs and ahhs and despite being very busy everyone had plenty of personal space and it was just excellent. It felt much more like new year than our experience in Danang on December 31st, and was a really lovely finale to our excellent 3 months in Vietnam.
If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!
Last week:
5 Days in Dalat
29 Jan, 2026
Next week:
Coming Soon!
Don’t forget I also run my own travel agent business, and I firmly believe that learning from my own mistakes in each destination is what makes me so good at planning travel for others. If this story has inspired you to take a trip to Vietnam or anywhere else, get in touch!