VIETNAM - Mui Ne (Second Saigon post just below)

Mui Ne is a beach resort town, popular due to its convienient distance from Ho Chi Minh and note-worthy because of its expansive sand dunes which span the indland side of the town. Aside from that it is unremarkable. The long, narrow town lies along 9kms of beach and seems to be entirly made up of beach resorts, souvenir shops and restaurants, all of which seem spookily empty.
We were tipped off the bus straight into one of the resorts (owned by the bus company of course) and we were surprised to find it rather pretty, right on the beach, clean and cheap. So we settled in and spent the rest of the afternoon on the quite-nice beach and swimming i the less-than-clean water - too many plastic bags for my liking. The evening failed to produce much in the way of entertainment, aside from a hair-raising, near-death experience on the back of a moto, so we sipped beer on our little balcony and had an early night.
Seeing as sand dunes seemed to be what Mui Ne is all about, we decided that we'd better go and look at them. So we stumbled, bleerily out into the darkness and into a waiting jeep at 5.00am this morning to bounce our way, gears screaching, to the White Sand dune to observe an overcast sunrise. Despite the uncertain weather, it was very beautiful. We sat perched on a dune overlooking a lake that was lined with what looked oddly like pine trees and watched a family of dogs scamper busily in the foreground while the sun did its best.
We were then rattled off to the Red Canyon, a bizarre little canyon made from bright red sand, which formed shapes very much like those of melting candels in Chianti bottles. I discoverd that, only being made of compressed sand, parts of the canyon could be snapped off and disintergrated in your hand, which lead to a brief moment of gleefull meaningless demolition of parts of the 'mountain' making us feel like giants. Fun.
At the Yellow Dune we were accosted by small boys commaning us to "Slide down, slide down' on thier offered boards. This quickly became simply: "Give money, give money" when they saw we weren't inclined to strap ourselves to sheets of plastic and hurl ourselves off dunes (tempting though) and finally "F**k you, f**k you when they realised that we weren't adherring to any of their requests. Nice. So we scampered from there and took refuge in the insanely picturesque fishing village all a-bob with little painted boats, the locals obligingly wearing triangular straw hats and scurrying around, oblivious to us, the only westerners. We were only noticed by 2 children selling sea shells. They smiled broadly at me, gave me one as a present and waved cheerly as our driver drove us, gawping in amazement, away.
Back for a wade in the Fairy Stream, why it is named that I don't know but it was nice nonetheless. And then it was breakfast time so we returned to our guest house, by now only 8.00am. Few!
We got a bit of sunning in on the beach before the heavens opened and, dodging between rain drops, Philp bid me farewell and got the bus back to Ho Chi Minh leaving me scribbling my diary.
Now, as I write this, the rain thumps down still and I am watching with mounting alarm as a huge flying cockroach is banging its way into the wall towards me...
Off into the highlands tomorrow and more bugs no doubt.