Experience the Grueling Wonders of Mui Ne's Ta Cu Mountain

Hordes of international tourists head to Mui Ne each year, bypassing the little fishing village of Phan Thiet. 

This quirk of tourism fate has left Phan Thiet largely unspoiled, making it an interesting and authentic place for adventurous families to visit.

Just four hours by train from Ho Chi Minh City, Phan Thiet has a range of budget options, as well as a few higher-end places to stay. 

Phan Thiet has its own foodie street, Tuyen Quang Street, full of teeny-tiny local eateries serving fantastic mi Quang (central Vietnamese noodle dish), banh xeo (sizzling pancake) and cha cuon, a wrap and roll dish that includes pork, sausage, egg spring rolls, a basket of herbs and a platter of rice paper to be used as wrappers. 

The local versions are each a little different to how the dishes are served elsewhere, as Phan Thiet is in an area that's sometimes considered the southern part of central Vietnam and other times the northern part of southern Vietnam. So the locals serve central Vietnamese dishes with a southern twist and southern Vietnamese dishes with a central twist. 

In Phan Thiet the mi Quang, a pork and prawn noodle dish, is more soup-y and more spicy than in its birthplace of Hoi An in central Vietnam (and you need to specify “không huyết” if you don't like blood cubes). The local version of banh xeo is also different, with the pancakes smaller in size, thicker in girth and chewier in texture. That might not sound so appealing, but chunks of banh xeo wrapped in mustard leaves and dipped into the tangy dipping sauce are a taste sensation not to be missed. 

Tuyen Quang Street is also home to Phan Thiet's quirkiest cafe, an open-air place that only serves great coffee and has an unusual feature - pet lizards. The owner of Pet Cafe at 28 Tuyen Quang is a lizard-fancier who decided to share his hobby with paying guests. If you arrive early, you get to see a variety of lizards, including iguanas, being groomed and prepared for their day of lizardly lounging. 

Phan Thiet also does fabulous seafood. There's a strip of seafood restaurants in Pham Van Dong Street, facing the river. Even though these places have menus in English and Russian, foreign tourists are still a novelty, so expectto receive a lot of attention from staff and other customers. 

A late afternoon stroll along Nguyen Tat Thanh Street will take you past many seafood carts, and local families sitting at plastic table and chairs snacking on crabs, snails and other crustaceans. The beach at the end of the street is a great spot to watch the sunset, while the locals do their evening exercises. From here, it's an easy stroll along some back streets to the seafood places in Pham Van Dong Street.  

Phan Thiet's attractions will take a few days to explore, and Mai Linh has a fleet of reliable taxis that make getting around town quite easy. You can also negotiate a day rate for a taxi, making longer excursions easy for those who don't want to hire motorbikes to get around. 

Phan Thiet is quite spread out, so walking between attractions isn't always feasible, especially if you have young kids.

The town's fishing fleet moors near the Tran Hung Dao Bridge, which provides a pleasant vantage point to watch the fisherfolks' comings and goings in the mornings, before the day heats up too much. From the bridge, it's an easy walk to another maritime marvel, the Whale Temple, also known as Van Thuy Tu. 

The Whale Temple, which shuts for a few hours in the middle of the day, is home to a 22-meter-long whale skeleton in a large side-building. The temple itself is small but quite colourful, with a miniature ship that may or may not prompt a discussion about pirates.

Another interesting attraction along the river is the Duc Thanh School, where Ho Chi Minh himself apparently taught as a young man, before leaving Vietnam for France. The pretty little school, renovated several times since Uncle Ho passed through, is best explored when it's deserted. If you're unfortunate enough to encounter a tour group at the school, just cross the road and spend some time exploring the Ho Chi Minh Museum before venturing back to the school. 

Allocate a full day to visiting the Reclining Buddha on Ta Cu Mountain, 30 km from Phan Thiet. The 49-metre-long Buddha is part of a sprawling complex on the side of the mountain, and access is via a cable, then a lot of steps. Make sure you carry some water for the long hot climb up to the Buddha. When you're there, remember it is a religious icon, so show respect to those praying and lighting incense at the various shrines. When visiting the complex, and any other religious site in Vietnam, knees and shoulders should be covered.

A much more ancient religious site exists in Phan Thiet, a relic from the mysterious Hindu kingdom of Champa that ruled Central Vietnam for 900 years. The PoshaInu Towers, 7km northwest of Phan Thiet, were built in the 8th century. Appreciating the three hilltop towers, dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, may require a bit of imagination, as most of the time the site is desolate and deserted. Local Cham people hold festivals at the towers, and some local fishermen visit the shrines to ensure their safety at sea. 

Barbara and her husband Vu lead street food tours in Ho Chi Minh City's back streets through Saigon Street Eats. Since their first bundle of joy arrived five years ago, Barbara, a former journalist, has become a family travel expert. Follow Barbara's blog here.

On Sand and Water

A friend of mine once commented, “So you live on a houseboat?” “Yeah, kinda… It’s an ocean of sand under us. It’s a sand dune beach.”

When you live in Mui Ne, you become more and more aware of living in a sea of change. Development, politics, tourism… but especially the environment. Everyone talks about the “microclimate” here, but we all keep trying to figure out what that really means. In Muine, we live on sand. Wet sand, dry sand, clean sand… dusty sand. We buy and sell it. We shovel it. We suck it up and spit it out with machines. We love it so much and when it goes, we miss it. Like an old and endearing friend, it always comes back.

Fifty kilometers inland sand seems to tip out of the mountains and in a sluice between the rocky points of the Cham towers to the southwest, and the peninsula that holds the town of Muine to the east and north, this sand pours into the south China Sea (called The East Sea in Vietnam). Wind picks up sand, grains at a time, and takes them up towards the mountains again. From the mountains to the sea, it’s a big sluice. We live on a fifty kilometer deep beach. 

The sand gets hot and creates a “heat draught” that pulls air off the ocean and makes Muine one of the best and most predictable wind sport spots in the world. Even as sand inland gets hot, the wind from the sea keeps the temperature near perfect along the coast. If the temperature drops for some reason, the warm air over the sand dunes seems to fall back towards the sea keeping it perfect. The heat creates a bubble and a lot of the stormy weather that comes to the south of Vietnam just seems to wrap around us. We often sit in the sun during the rainy season watching dramatic storms over the ocean. Often when we drive to Phan Thiet, a line of water on the highway shows where the rain begins and motorcycles are pulled over to put on their raincoats. Overall, we have the dryest and best weather in Vietnam.

The sand under us swirls and stretches and flows. There are days each year when a person sitting on a deck chair at Joe’s Café will be looking eye to eye with someone walking on the beach while at another time the beach will have disappeared completely and the ocean laps or crashes our patios and walls. The beach sometimes will go for a couple hundred meters out at low tide, at others it is gone completely. When you enter the sea, you might be able to walk through the shallow seas for a couple hundred meters or you might find yourself over your head in just a few meters. Where’s the beach? You’re on top of it. Nature thinks it just put it here and will pick it up later. We’re squaters to nature. We’re not going anywhere! Let the great contest and cooperation continue!

White sand dominates and what we call the “White Sand Dunes” is a special place and ecosystem. People stop at the “Red Sand Dunes” as well and the hike up the “Fairy Stream” is a must as a mixture of sands is cut by flowing water Grand Canyon style. Red sand we associate with iron ore. Black sand is heavier than white sand and is associated with titanium and titanium mining. Black sand stays out of sight until you walk on the white beaches, your feet sink in and a bit sticks to your feet.

One of the other great benefits to our microclimate is the currents that for most of the year keep all trash away and our beach pristine and water clear. There is no rip current here to take you out making our beach safer than many, but you might get a couple resorts further than you thought in a hurry as it takes you down the beach. 

It’s so confusing because even as the beach, the actual sand, will go up or down a couple meters in an hour, it’s hard to remember what it was like. People brag or lament. We hear about global warming, changes in rainfall, cutting down the mangroves in the Mekong, development… greening of the sanddunes with farms and golfcourses… we hear about the factories and watch long peirs, jetties or holding walls go out into the sea to control sand. We debate the designs of our seawalls and watch some fail. We think of the sand going up and down the coast and sometimes in and out of the sea, but of course it’s moving vertically as well as we build and change the ground water table.

I often think of a glass of water stirred and dropping a little blue ink in to watch it swirl up and down and around. I think the sand is doing that below us and around us. But of course that isn’t perfect either… sand when dry is solid or dusty, sand wet is even harder until it gets wet enough, and then it liquifies. 

One thing is for sure, we love our microclimate. We love the heavily touristed winter months when wind and weather are perfect and people choose us instead of chilly Natrang and Danang. We love the rainy seasons when it rains- but rarely and we love how the air still has that after rain freshness. We love our beach and pine for it when it is gone. We live in constant change.

According to #iAMHCMC’s resident Phan Thiet expert, Steve Raymond, in addition to suffering from a serious case of mistaken identity, Phan Thiet City is being hampered by the slow progress of the proposed international airport.

Having lived and worked in the area for more than 10 years, Raymond, the former General Manager of Pandanus Resort, still despairs whenever he sees locations in Phan Thiet incorrectly listing themselves as being in “Mui Ne”, the popular kite-surfing mecca 10 km down the road.

Image source: travelwireasia.com

While he understands the reason owners and operators would want to associate with the name, in his opinion it’s been a self-defeating strategy.

“The problem with it,” Raymond told #iAMHCMC, “is that when tourists google the location of accommodation or businesses using the name Mui Ne, they are directed to a spot 10 or 20 kms away from the actual place.”

He goes as far as to call it a “misinformation campaign” that has contributed to the failure of several businesses.

‘‘Because of the promotion of ‘Mui Ne’ as a destination, the greatest beneficiaries are businesses located in Mui Ne, Ham Tien and Phu Hai wards, all to the north and east of the city centre and still part of Phan Thiet. However, since no tourism body helps promote businesses along the beaches south of Phan Thiet in Tien Thanh commune and Ke Ga, many of them have closed or have very few customers.”

Delayed

In addition, Raymond has bemoaned the lack of progress on the planned Phan Thiet International Airport, which he says has halted construction since he last spoke to #iAMHCMC in 2015. This is despite a recent visit from Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, who in February signed a decree approving the upgrade of the planned Phan Thiet runway from 2400 m to 3050 m. According to one report by local news outlet Bao Binh Thuan Online, this will allow the airport to handle aircraft as large as the Airbus A320—popular with the likes of China Southern and China Eastern Airlines—and increase the terminal’s annual passenger capacity to around two million.

Image source: tourdulichviet.com

“At the moment, the spot where the airport will be is not much more than an empty lot”, Raymond said, “although the plans for road work, a shopping mall and other associated businesses have increased the value of the land in the area by 10-fold.”

Exacerbating Raymond’s frustration has been the continued delay of the US$750 million, 98 km Dau Giay-Phan Thiet Expressway, which has been in the works for the last 10 years. In April of this year, Vietnam Investment Review reported on the termination by the Prime Minister of its latest, World Bank-led iteration.

“The termination could not be avoided”, a senior official from the Ministry of Transport told VIR. “Investors have been discouraged by unresolved problems relating to the risk-sharing mechanism on exchange rates and the revenue guarantee.”

A New Hope

Despite the challenges, Phan Thiet has still shown what Raymond calls “exponential growth” since the economic downturn of 2014-15. Renewing hope that its progress would again be fast-tracked, at the end of May this year, the Prime Minister held a working session with leaders of Binh Thuan Province to discuss the construction process of the US$247 million airport project.

However, even without an airport or a freeway, according to Bao Binh Thuan Online, the location remains popular, with more than 140,000 visitors flocking to Phan Thiet City during the Reunification Day long weekend holiday in 2016.

Aside from enjoying the beach and taking in the hustle of one of the busiest fishing ports and most vibrant markets in southern Vietnam, many of them arrived to witness the area’s significant number of historical monuments. Chief among them are the Po Sah Inu Towers, which date back to the 8th century and are some of the most important remaining vestiges of the Cham Kingdom. Formerly featuring several towers, only three remain, creating a sombre sense of history and a magical ‘golden hour’ photo opportunity.

Other historical and cultural attractions include the largest reclining Buddha in Southeast Asia, which sits on Ta Cu (“holy mountain”) 28 km west of the city. Inhabited by an extended family of enthusiastic monkeys, the mountain offers a stunning vista of the dragon-fruit and paddy fields below, framed by the blue of the East Sea.

Image source: theme.hstatic.net

For those looking to up their knowledge of the country’s greatest leader, the Duc Thanh Museum near the banks of the Ca Ty River is a living tribute to Ho Chi Minh, who taught at the Duc Manh school in 1910 before setting off to France to continue his own education. It’s a quaint, charming reminder of one of ‘Uncle Ho’s’ core philosophies and features memorabilia about his life and time in Phan Thiet, surely another of Vietnam’s most underrated destinations, with or without an airport.

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