We took a bus from Saigon north to Mui Ne, a chill beach town. A major typhoon lashed this area and our bus pulled into town to flooded streets and wicked rain and wind. We found a guest house to stay in for the night and awoke to beautiful weather the next morning.

We grabbed some lounge chairs and spent the day relaxing on the very pretty beach.

Mui Ne also has excellent seafood and we tucked in to it every night we were here.

After witnessing the chaotic traffic scene in Saigon, we weren’t sure about renting motorbikes in Vietnam. Tranquil Mui Ne seemed the perfect spot to try it so we rented them from our guesthouse for about $5 per day.

There are sand dunes that you can sled down.

There’s a fishing village that is famous for making fish sauce. They catch tons of these little fish, dry them out and then let them ferment for a very pungent sauce that is found in a lot of Vietnamese cooking.

There are also Cham ruins scattered outside of the town. The Cham people were rivals with the Khmer Empire in Cambodia over 1,000 years ago.

At night we enjoyed some fresh seafood, drinks on the beach and some night swimming.

While this town was very relaxing, we were a bit stressed about my bank situation. My bank, Wells Fargo, thought that my spending activity in South Korea was suspicious and flagged my account. Unable to reach me (they never emailed me), they cancelled my debit card – a full 90 days after the supposed suspicious activity. This occurred in Vietnam and they were unable to reinstate my card or send me a new one in Vietnam – basically leaving me without any access to my funds until my mother arrived in Vietnam with my new bank card. With no cash nor access to my bank account, we had been bankrolling our trip with cash advances on credit cards (they charge about 25% interest for these transactions!). We stayed four nights in Mui Ne and took a bus back to Saigon to meet my mother and get my new bank card.