Diving in Nha Trang

Hey boys & girls. Sorry for being such bad friends and not keeping the blog up to date. Thought I'd fill you in on life a bit. We recently finished our time in Nha Trang which is billed as on of Vietnam's best diving locations. We came to this town with one thing in mind, diving! After checking out the local dive shops we chose one and signed up for a night dive. Ok smartass, we use flashlights so we can see. This really adds to the freak you out factor as you can easily loose track of which way is up, even if only for a moment. The night dive was great, that is after I got over my initial panic attack. Having never dove at night before I really screwed up some simple things on the decent. While we descended, I needed to add a little bit of air to my BCD (the vest the tank is attached to and that you wear to keep you buoyant) to keep from hitting the bottom. Well, I managed to shine my flashlight in my eye and then overinflated the BCD and sent myself flying back to the surface 20 feet above me and right into the bottom of the boat (I'm ok) before sinking like a rock when I finally got the air out of the BCD. This is beginner mistakes that I don't usually do and it hurt at the time but I can laugh about it now. The company that took us diving managed to persuade us to sign up for the PADI Advanced Open Water course and we spent 2 of the next three days completing this course. What does it mean to be certified? Nothing really. We are allowed to dive deeper now and it has helped us become better and more confident divers. It's also step towards becoming dive masters for our active/early retirement plan of running charter cruises with diving and gourmet food.

The other big news from Nha Trang is that after 3 1/2-months of travel we were robbed for the first time ever. I guess our luck just ran out. We were robbed in the pre-dawn hours while sleeping in our hotel room. Our room had 2 rooms, one we slept in and another room where we left our bags. It was a warm night so we had the fans on and the windows open. The hotel owner had told us to close the windows while we slept but we never thought about why and she never said. The windows had bars over them and the building had a big gate with nice metal spikes on top so we thought we were pretty safe. While we slept, someone crawled onto our second floor balcony which wrapped around the two rooms and using a 7 foot pole with a hook on it (pics below), reached in and lifted my shorts, Ewa's shorts and Ewa's daypack to the window, emptied both of our shorts of cash and anything interesting and took Ewa's backpack with our little camera with 2 days of pictures on it. We will be reimbursed by our insurance company so life goes on. It's just that getting robbed shakes you a bit. Everyone we've discussed it with is amazed we weren't robbed already after spending 3 1/2-months on the road, and especially after 2-months in South America, so I guess we've been lucky. (You can see the pole they used in the first photo on the lower left corner - bastards!)

Off to Hanoi to see the "Pickled Ho". Believe it or not they for some twisted reason they actually preserved Ho Chi Mihn after his death and you can see him on display. Really twisted but how can you resist!?!