We had a long journey from An Bang Beach to Dalat, so we decided to break it up with a one night stopover in Bai Xep on the south-east coast.
When we got to An Bang, we realised it was a long way to the next place we really wanted to go to. I had read a lot about how amazing Bai Xep is so I’d really wanted to include that, but the weather was turning and the whole of the south-east coast of Vietnam was due to get rainy, thundery weather until about mid 2019 (ok, maybe just a week).
So we considered all the options and then decided that – given that Da Lat was our next stop and a long way – we’d need to break up the journey somewhere, and so we may as well do it in Bai Xep and maybe the weatherman would be wrong.
We booked ourselves on a train for the 6 hour journey between Danang and Dieu Trit (neither An Bang nor Bai Xep have train stations, because that would be far too easy). A ticket cost us 250,000d/9 EUR. And our hotel in An Bang sorted us a taxi to Danang train station (30 minutes away) at the crack of dawn for the same price as the train.
We arrived much too early again (the Vietnamese seem to worry if you’re not at the station an hour in advance), so we got a coffee and fried egg sandwich to go at the cafe outside the station. This time we had to print our tickets using a touchscreen machine thingy, and then scan them in before being let onto the platform. Fancy.
The train journey was pretty uneventful and when we arrived in Dieu Tri we jumped into a cab for the 40 minute journey (350,000d/13.24 EUR) to Life’s a Beach Backpackers in Bai Xep. Here we’d really decided to splash out on a 4 EUR bamboo hut for the night. The huts and shared toilets and showers are dotted up the hillside and from wherever you are you can hear the waves crashing on the rocks below. So for our 4 euros we got a bed with good mattress and sheets, a mosquito net, and 2 free welcome beers. Yep, 2 free beers for 4 euros. So another way to look at it is that we bought some beers and got a free room.
We really liked what they had going on here – a nice communal bar area where you could get cheap drinks and snacks pretty much all day, and the staff would just stand and chat to you. So we hung out there for the night, making the most of happy hour and chatting to the 2 friendly German Workawayers – it’s not like we could have gone much further in the rain. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see Bai Xep in all its glory but we still had a great time, if even for just one night. The view over the bay dotted with crab cage lights was pretty cool.
