This morning we finally found out why the Open Tour has not been so great compared to my expectations that were based on my previous experience…

We were supposed to be picked up at 7:30 in the morning to go back to Nha Trang. We fully expected to be waiting there till about 9 o’clock as hour and a half was the normal waiting time at every stop on our journey down south. At 7:31 a mini bus stopped in front of our hotel, leaving us speechless. We hopped on it only to find, when we arrived to the assembly place, that these guys were the real Sinh Café people and that we have actually been traveling with a completely different company! “So that is why we were having so many problems on our way! We have not been traveling with who we thought we were!!.. I was about to change my opinion on Sinh Café but right there I realized I didn’t have to. Sinh Café really still seems to be the reliable company I got to know last year, when I was trying to get my bike into the country, and we only fell “victim” to a poster office which actually bought tickets for us with Hanh’s Café. See the suspicious similarity in the name? These people are obviously parasiting on a good name of another company. The fact that at every city we stopped by Hanh’s Café only made me thought that these guys are a branch of, or are aligned with Sinh Café. Well, now I know they are not and that is very good news. Next time we know who to travel with and who to avoid. Please be carefull too. I would only suggest to select real Sinh Café.

As we asked later today in a real Sinh Café office, the Open Tour with them would be only 18 dollars more expensive, but I’m sure that without any delays and other problems and with stops at interesting places included in the price. I suppose they would have an English speaking guide in the bus too to tell us something about the places they stop at, too (which also was my own previous experience with them).

To the conflict to what we paid for, the ride from Dalat to Nha Trang was serviced by a shockabsorber-less minibus. We paid more not to ride on minibuses, not even talking about minibuses with removed suspension and shock absorbers. Even on a nice road we were jumping up and down on our seats like if we all were having a fit. And I was naïve enough to think I would catch up with my sleep on the way… :(

When we arrived to Nha Trang we had half a day to see the city. However, we would be robbed off our time by more problems with our return tickets. As half-expected we really had more problems with our tickets in Nha Trang. After a little argument with the officer in Hanh’s Café office we were told to come back at 5PM to see the manager. Great, we had to cut our day in half again just to solve problems that were not supposed to be there to start with. Fortunately, when we came back to the office at agreed 5PM the manager already had known about our problem and was very easy to issue a new, no-problem ticket for us.

Nha Trang itself seems to be a good holiday city by the ocean, with nice beaches and  big dumper waves. It didn’t take long for us to call Nha Trang a little Gold Coast (as in Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia). There are lots of hotels in the city and by the beach and we saw a very nice looking resort at one part of the beach.