Qui Nhon and Tet Eve

We have now made it about halfway up the country and are making progress despite the Tet holiday.  We left Nha Trang and headed north towards Qui Nhon which is where we felt we had the bet options for spending the Tet holiday evening.  Think of it as the same as New years eve in North America.  The drive up was very pretty and there was an opportunity or two to stop for some photos.

We arrived in Qui Nhon and found a cool hostel called John and Paul inn which was Beatles themed.  It was a bit higher on the price range, but at $7 per night it was still a steal.  We ended up chilling on the rooftop for a bit in the evening and then called it quits pretty early. The next day I woke up early for a beach front run which was quite nice.  I haven’t been that good at keeping my speed work up but I have been pretty successful overall of getting miles in.

After the run, I grabbed breakfast at the hostel and then headed up to a lookout which overlooked the city.  In typical Vietnam fasion once I got up there I found a construction site with a semi comopleted structure at the the top of the hill.  A worker there pointed at the structure and made a motion that the photos would be better from up there.  It was pretty funny because at most construction sights, the workers tell you to scram.  The photos were pretty nice, but the ladder used to get up onto the structure was sketchy as hell.

I headed back to the hotel and met up with a guy from Ireland and a guy from Finland who were drinking beers on the roof.  I decided to join them and after a while was a few beers deep and playing Woody Tour (fake Jenga) and Loopin Louie which are two excellent day drinking games.  A few hours went by and it was happy hour at the bar downstairs.  We got our free beer for being a guest and then another buy one get one free.  3 beers for around $.50 is a pretty darn good deal to me.  There was also an instagram contest which was announced at 8pm and a fooseball tournament which started at 7pm.

8pm rolled around and we were in the midst of the fooseball tournament.  Matteo and I had entered for fun, but were crushing it overall so far.  This is when the instagram contest was announced and I was declared the winner which got me an additional 3 free beers.  However, there was another entrant into the contest and so I gave her one of the three.  The fooseball tournament continued and Matteo and I kept advancing, until we reached the final game.  We were up against the guys running the tournament who ended up staying at that hostel for a few days since they did not want to travel during Tet.  Anyways, it was a hard fought final, but we ended up not winning but due to the fact that the winners were basically ringers, they gave us the two free drinks as the winnings.  It was a great night so far but was only just getting started.

This evening was Tet eve or New Years eve, which promised to have celebrations and fireworks in the various squares and meeting places in the city.  We rallied up some troops and headed out the main square which I had scoped out on my earlier run.  When the lot of North American folks at the hostel imagined a new years celebration, we imagined a lot of drunk vietnamese people in a square similar to how North Americans do it.  When we arrived to the square after having drank our road beers and prior beers at the hostel, we happened upon a lot of people, but most were in a very sober state of mind.  It tuned out that the random white, drunk foreigners were the ones that were the main source of entertainment.

The fireworks at midnight were incredible, although as soon as the fireworks were over, it was a mass exodus to the exits.  Motorbikes EVERYWHERE.  We walked back to the hostel and at some point in the evening, one of the locals gave me a balloon dog (it’s the year of the dog) and I names him John.

The next morning we were planning on making it further north so we called in a night and got some buety sleep.  The next morning was a travel day up to Quang Ngai….