Mui Ne | Ham Tien
Mui Ne is actually a fishing village placed on a peninsula in the South Chinese Sea at Vietnam's long east coast. Between Mui Ne and the bigger town of Phan Thiet lies the sea resort of Ham Tien.
Ham Tien, which is in most cases by the tourist industry falesly called Mui Ne, is brutally touristic. The tourist boom started with a solar eclipse in October 1995, when many visitors came here to watch the astronomic event. It's actually mostly a place which parallels one long coastal road, which is seamed with resorts, guesthouses, hotels, restaurants, tourist agencies and souvenir shops. Here and there is a workshop or a living house with garden embedded into the tourist surroundings. The only main road is pretty busy, motorbikes, cars, many buses and also trucks pest the place with din, smog and danger. Traffic is relentless also on the sidewalks; taxis and moreover speeding of motorbikes make walking also here a dangerous adventure. And it's not only the locals who drive badly; Westerners adapt all to quick to the bad driving manners. It's not very clean and actually a very boring, unattractive place. Besides tourists from other parts of Vietnam many Russian and Chinese visitors come here, together with a number of Westerners. Many menues and signs are written in Cyrillic (Russian script). The often strong winds make the bays here attractive for kite surfers.
The place is a good example for rampant tourism into a deserted, impovered area. The long sandbeaches and the sandy inland were over all the past centuries almost completely useless land, infertile and not arable. Nobody wanted it and only the poorest people lived here. That only changed when the tourist industries developed the suddenly so highly appreciated sand beaches for the 'recreation' of the modern human material.
Another part of the economy is still fishing. Remarkable are the many circular fishing vessels here, who are unique for Vietnam. They have been invented by the local fishermen in the colonial times to avoid being taxed, as they would have been by using usual fishing boats.
There are a few sights around Mui Ne / Ham Tien. Particularly beautiful is a river landscape with bizarre and colourful sandstone formations. The river got the touristic name 'fairy stream' and is actually, at least in dry season, a flat stream one can easily walk along barfoot. After a few hundred meters one meets a waterfall. The steep western side of the river consists of red and white sandstone, so soft that one can crumble it with the fingernails. Inside the riverbed are some souvenir shops and simple restaurants placed. In the mornings the river is mildly visited, in the afternoon it can get quite busy here, when busloads of tourists, mostly Chinese, walk it upwards. Most of them don't go as far as to the very end, so that it is more quiet at the waterfall.
Another sight between Ham Tien and Phan Thiet are the three brick towers Po Sha Nu, who are of Cham origin. The Cham empire was a strong rival of the empire of Angkor.
In the wider surroundings are landscapes coined by white and red sand dunes. It seems to be that the area is particularly dry and forms a small desert. It's dryer here than in other parts of the country. It's generally so that Mui Ne is built on sandy grounds, all along the coastline, what is to see when walking one of the few roads upwards into the hills. Not far away from the coastline, in the inlad runs a parallel road which has little traffic. It's a bypass road to avoid the traffic in the busy village of Mui Ne.