Show me the Mui Ne

Feeling refreshed after 3 days at the beach in Mui Ne. (Before I go on, out of consideration for my readers, I should say that we are now somewhere cooler and wetter and by the time we get to Beijing we'll be jealous of your temperatures!)

Barely a cloud in the sky. Mui Ne features about 10km of fairly thin beach (vanishing entirely at points) along a single road, with a variety of resorts along one side and restaurants on the other.

We stayed at the Blue Ocean (our last 3 hotels have been River 108, Blue River and now Blue Ocean, so I'm disappointed to be breaking the run) which was fairly swanky but still good value, and the local restaurants outside the resort hotels are ludicrously cheap. So it made for some good downtime.

The main beach activity here is kite-surfing, which looks like great fun - plenty of wind and waves here for it - but it's pretty expensive and I suspect you need to invest quite a few hours to achieve basic competence. So we stuck to a bit of swimming, a very poor round of an exotic but badly designed mini golf course (lack of bounce meant the ball almost always came to a halt in an unplayable position against a wall) and both indoor and outdoor pool (yes, as in the cue-sport - it gets interesting outdoors when the wind picks up).

Very relaxing here but strangely quiet - our hotel feels about 20% full and it can be a battle to find a restaurant with anyone in it. Maybe we're just a tiny bit too far before Christmas (17th-20th) but we're both surprised as it's a great, cheap place for a beach holiday.

A taxi then took us to the (relatively) nearby station of Muong Man to get a sleeper to Danang.   Properly in the sticks, not all the trains stop here. Ours is on time - couple of minutes early in fact. We're in the top-grade luxury accommodation, which is... Well, it's air-conditioned, and the beds are fine. I would have been happier if there hadn't been people on our alloted beds, but the guard moved them on and I expect we'll survive...