jessica marmor

Remember that scene in “Independence Day” where Air Force One is taking off and all of Washington D.C. is blowing up just in its wake? Well, substitute in the dinky Vietnam Airlines plane for Air Force One and the city of Da Nang for D.C. and thunderous, ridiculous, pounding rain for alien-induced explosion and you pretty much have what our flight out of the central coast was like last Tuesday, the 2nd of October. Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but as several concerned friends and family members have written to us, they did end up having to evacuate something like 400,000 people because of Typhoon Lekima and it also apparently killed 12 people. Yikes. We just missed the truly bad brunt of it (all the flights were canceled the day after we left Da Nang), but we did spend two rain-soaked days in Hoi An, which was otherwise a charming place to be. The streets flooded up to our knees. I was constantly donning the H.O.T. smurf-blue poncho. Really the rain was just amazing and we were unsure if it was really safe to be flying in all that. Even more amazing was that when we got to Nha Trang, just a forty-five minute flight down the coast, the weather was just fine.

In fact, it was quite beautiful. So beautiful we decided to book it out of the busy, tout-clogged, neon-lit streets of Nha Trang for a remote, hippie-dippie-type resort called Jungle Beach, run by a Canadian who, as far as I could tell, never wears anything but boxer shorts. We stayed in the “beach-front suite,” which was a true bungalow — three walls and a mattress on a platform, covered in mosquito netting. I totally roughed it. There was little electricity and barely running water. We could literally see the beach through the “window” (read: square-shaped hole) in our bamboo and straw hut. There was really nothing to do but sit around on the totally isolated beach and stare at the horizon. Which is why we were out of touch for some time, and not dutifully posting on the blogs.

We were also fed three meals a day by the super friendly madame of the house, who cooked up tasty, authentic, family-style Vietnamese food. This also meant we had to share a table with the various Germans, Israelis, Brits and others at Jungle Beach, but I was able to put my American xenophobia on hold, pull out the friendly face for a few days and make the typical travel small talk. So where have you been in Vietnam? Ah, all the typical places. And how long are you traveling? Oh, only two weeks… And where are you from? Oh, America…

You get the picture. And I’ll hopefully be posting pictures of Jungle Beach real soon. It was something else.