19 May 2019
We booked this trip about six weeks before we arrived and, unfortunately, it did not meet our expectations. Our guide's grasp of the English language was quite poor (disappointing as all our other Vietnamese guides spoke excellent English) and we mostly reverted to our use of pantomime and took enough photos to do further research upon our return to the ship.
The guide was late and we were walked over to the Vietnam Oceanographic Institute, a very poor example of what Vietnam has to offer. The live animals and fishes were poorly housed and, fortunately, I had seen most of the sealife in our home of the Cayman Islands so at least we knew what we were seeing. There are thousands of jars of preserved marine specimens (which, apparently is used as an educational outing for the locals schools)! We then took a car to the Hon Chong Promontory Rocks, where we watched a lot of tourists climbing around on some large rocks but not much else. People are no longer able to dive off the rocks into the ocean and it seemed that we weren't supposed to be climbing on the rocks either. We were then taken to the Po Nagar Cham Towers (built between the 7th and 12th centuries) where Cham, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhists still go to worship and we were given an hour to walk around without any guidance. I suspect that this was due to our lack of ability to communicate with our guide. We were then advised that we were to go back to the ship but I showed her our itinerary which indicated that we were also supposed to go to the Long Son Pagoda so she took us over there to see the huge white Buddha seated on a lotus blossom and then to the Nha Trang Cathedral, build in the French Gothic style.
While our guide did eventually take us to all the sites, I, sadly, cannot recommend this tour unless you have been to Nha Trang before and are well aware of what you are seeing. While we had done some research before arriving, it would have been nice to have heard things from the guide.