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Nha Trang
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Nestled below the bottom lip of the Cai River, some 260km north of Phan Thiet,
NHA TRANG
has earned its place on Vietnam's tourist mainline partly on merit and partly owing to its location. By the time the Nguyen lords wrested this patch of the country from Champa in the mid-seventeenth century, the intriguing
Po Nagar Cham towers
had already stood, stacked impressively on a hillside above the Cai, for over 700 years. They remain Nha Trang's most famous image, yet it's the coastline that brings tourists flocking: the town boasts the finest municipal beach in Vietnam, scuba-diving courses are available here, and there are plenty of day-trips to outlying islands too.
Most new arrivals in the city make a beeline for the
municipal beach
, a grand six-kilometre scythe of soft yellow sand that's only five minutes' stroll east of Cho Dam market. The Pasteur Institute at the top of Tran Phu houses the
Alexandre Yersin Museum
(Mon-Sat 8-11am & 2-4.30pm; $2), which profiles the life of the Swiss-French scientist who settled in Nha Trang in 1893 and became a local hero, thanks not to his greatest achievement - the discovery of a plague bacillus - but rather to his educational work in sanitation and agriculture, and to his ability to predict typhoons and thus save the lives of fishermen. Yersin's desk is here, with his own French translations of Horace still slotted under its glass top; so, too, are the barometers and telescope he used to forecast the weather, and his phenomenal library. The huge
White Buddha
seated on a hillside above Long Son Pagoda in the northwest of town is Nha Trang's major landmark. It was crafted in 1963 to symbolize the Buddhist struggle against the repressive Diem regime, and around its lotus-shaped pedestal are carved images of the monks and nuns that set fire to themselves in protest. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Viet Nam,
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