Just Another Day for You and Me (and 3 teenagers) in Paradise ...

So, 2 weeks ago we spent the weekend in the hugely popular coastal tourist destination of Mui Ne. (and I made the kids write their blog posts as soon as we got back) Yes, it was lovely, yes it was relaxing, yes absolutely http://www.fullmoon-village.com was the nicest holiday accommodation we've ever stayed in but sadly my memory of this wonderful family holiday will always be tarnished by the view of the the trash strip along the coast form the edge of our resort AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD SEE. Not only was it unsafe to wander bare-foot along the sand but I felt sad for the locals who clearly don't have the infrastructure to deal with their own litter. Their children will inherit a location that tourists will have abandoned. I even spent an hour bent over in the hot sun filling a big bag (that was lying on the beach) with trash myself much to the amusement of my husband watching from the 2nd floor of the beachfront restaurant over his ice coffee. Unsure what to do with my heavy plastic sack of rubbish, I ended up leaving it on the edge of the clean beach area hoping that whoever cleans it might find it and dispose of it appropriately. It bothers me that in a country where people mostly don't recycle, staff hand out plastic bottles of water and individually wrapped wet wipes to every passenger on every train every day. I will return to beautiful NZ with a new respect for our civil engineers who oversee waste management and the important job they do, even in our larger population centres, keeping the place tidy! Hey, I know someone who speaks Vietnamese and wants to study civil engineering .....

Back to our fantastic resort - one of the best assets at Full Moon is their "beach boy" - the guy who spent an hour in the surf, which was so warm, teaching our girls to "pa-dool, pa-dool, always pa-dool" on their stand-up paddle-boards. He was really enthusiastic and friendly - I told his boss to keep him and we gave him a good tip. He had offered to teach them for just $10 but earnt way more than that. If we hadn't been having so much fun mainly doing nothing we could have tried wind-surfing or taken the catamaran sail boat out. We also could have gone exploring and discovered the amazing sand dunes that we read about in the Lonely Planet Guide after we got back but we had such a lovely place to stay and only 2 nights so we decided to just stay.

Ok, this isn't our beach boy and we didn't do this but we saw lots of boats like this!