Vietnam: Phan Thiet

The final few days of my Vietnam trip were spent at the beach in Phan Thiet. This was one of the things that attracted me to the holiday - I've been on escorted tours before where I've been rushed about so much that I've felt like I needed a holiday to recover! It was also a bit of an experiment in seeing whether I'd like a beach holiday.

The resort was lovely, with beautiful gardens, a pool, good eateries, and a wonderful spa. We each got a welcome drink with a flower in it, and a dragon fruit was provided in each room. And there were a few cats wandering around the place too!

The spa treatments were really reasonably priced, so I got an hour-long Vietnamese massage, a reflexology foot massage, and a pedicure, all on the first morning, and a manicure on the final morning. I also relaxed by wandering on the beach, doing some beachcombing and taking photos of the sunset and sunrise.

The shops in Phan Thiet were not quite what we'd been told, they all had similar combinations of tourist tat. So it was just as well we'd done our souvenir shopping elsewhere! And we had our worst meal of the trip at a nearby restaurant - I won't bore you with the details, but just about everything that could be wrong with it was wrong! But that was more than made up for by the final night's meal, in a different restaurant, which was one of the best I've ever had, and even delighted the avid foodie next to me!

It was lovely to relax by the pool, swim in the pool, go in the sea, have some treatments at the spa, and wander the beach. After a day of that, however, some of us did start to get a little bored so we booked a jeep trip to the fairy stream, a fishing village, and sand dunes! It was great fun walking for an hour barefoot in the stream to the waterfall and back, seeing the masses of boats at the fishing village, and climbing to the top of a huge sand dune! It was the perfect end to a wonderful holiday!