Today I got up early and walked to the beachfront to meet with the diving team for our excursion. We took a taxi to the port, where we boarded our boat, a wooden typical Vietnamese boat, with all of the diving gear at the back.
As we started sailing, we got our briefing about the day’s plan and dives, before we met our guide who gave us a more in-depth introduction to the dives we would be doing and where we would be going. We then tried on all of our equipment, making sure it was all safe and working.
As we stopped at our first dive site, we jumped into the water and slowly defended to 17m underwater. We first went through some thin corrals, where we encountered an octopus that changed colours as it tried to hide and turn into a rock. As we continued we saw a few small fishes, before we started diving through some spaces in between rocks, making it seem like we were going through caves. Finally, after 40 mins we went back up to the surface, where I was able to see all the stats from my dive thanks to my Apple Watch.
Back on the boat, the boat sailed us to a different dive spot, whilst I napped in the sun on the front of the boat. When we got to the diving site, we geared up once again and jumped in, but immediately after going underwater you could tell this would not be a great dive. We first had to go through a cloud of stinging filaments which stung my leg and arms before we reached the bottom where the water was so murky, we only had a meter of visibility in front of us, barely seeing the back of the fins of the person in front of us. Thankfully though, after 40 mins of murkiness, we reached a spot where the water cleared up and we were able to see a few eels including a white and back one, that looked like a barcode. We also got to see a non-puffed pufferfish. After 50 wish mins of our dive, we climbed back out, once again through the stingers which this time went for my lip.
Back on the boat, we were served our lunch, some barbecue pork with rice, as our boat sailed back to the harbor to drop us off. There we headed back to the hotel, where I took a nap to recover from the diving. For dinner, we had to grab something quickly, so I grabbed a souvlaki, which for some reason seemed to be everywhere in Nha trang. Next, we took our bags and went to the train station, where we waited for our night train to arrive. When it finally did, we boarded to find a very basic train, with some cockroaches in the cabin, including in some of the other beds (thankfully not mine). It was a bit difficult to sleep because it was noisy and uncomfortable due to the train not being the cleanest, but I got some sleep.