First thing that comes to mind when I think of our experience in Mui Ne is “ugh.” While I enjoyed the sunshine and being able to be in my swimsuit all day, the experience was exhausting and unpleasant. First of all, the distance from Vung Tau to Mui Ne is about 100 miles, and google maps estimated the time to be about three and a half hours. Nope, we were in the bus for six hours. The thing about Vietnamese buses is that they are more unpleasant than the buses I’m used to. This is due to the constant honking to alert motorbikes of their presence as if they could not hear the ancient bus rumbling behind them, but this bus also had a whooping noise every time he honked the horn (which was no less than every five minutes). We finally arrived to LongSon MuiNe Campground Beach Resort, which is advertised as the “best beach campground” in Mui Ne.
The resort was problematic because we opted to stay in tents, which was uncomfortable and not like camping in Montana at all. The pads on the floor of the tent were old and provided no padding. There were holes in the tents, and the zippers barely closed if at all. We booked a tent with an ocean view, and were only able to get that on the third night, which happened to be bonfire night on the beach. As we climbed into that tent, the zippers completely would not close, so I asked the lady at the front desk if we could either move tents or if someone could repair the zippers as it was only 8pm. She responded that it was too late to switch tents and the “fix-men” were not available. Me and Sam’s bodies are now covered with large mosquito bites as a result. The food was extremely mediocre, and we were very isolated from the town. The beach was filthy, and once we saw a rotting dog we vowed to never walk on that beach again.
Despite the negatives of Mui Ne, we did manage to enjoy ourselves. We lounged in the sun, Sam swam a lot, and I read a few books while swinging on the large wooden swings. We went on a dune tour, which was pretty cool, but still full of what were learning are stereotypical Vietnamese scams. Our days were mostly spent lazily avoiding our tent and napping on the beach.
At 4:30am we headed out to the white sand dunes with two other girls, but when we arrived in the pitch black we learned that our driver would not be walking with us because we were expected to pay more money to rent an ATV. So the four of us blindly went out into the dark white sand dunes hoping to catch the sunrise, but it was too foggy and we had a misunderstanding with the driver. We all heard him say that we needed to be back in 15 minutes, but he had said 50 minutes. This led to us getting lost in the darkness trying to get back in time, and not being able to find our driver because he had passed out in a hammock.
The next part of the tour was the fishing village, which I found to be very cool. It was 6am and all of the fishermen and women were sorting through what they had caught the night before. They would dump the net full of sea creatures onto a tarp, and then sort them according to type. We saw octopuses, squid, shrimp, eel, starfish, and many shellfish. The only downfall was that the beach was filthy and all of the dead fish were just left to rot causing the whole beach to reek.
My favorite part of the tour was the Fairy Stream where a stream flows through the greenery and the red sand dunes. Sam and I walked through the stream in awe of the lush green plants in contrast with the bright red sand and the sharp limestone cliffs. We heard there was a waterfall at the end, so along with one of our tour mates, Moiwa, we walked down to find it. It was slightly underwhelming, but the walk was pleasant and there was not nearly as much trash as we’ve seen in the rest of Mui Ne.
The red sand dunes were majestic and took me back to Utah, making me a bit homesick. The four of us, now quite friendly, walked along the sand dunes as Moiwa, a 38 London woman (who literally looks like she’s 25) told us about all of her world travels. Zoë chimed in with her travels as well, but didn’t seem eager to elaborate on her experience as an American who joined the Israeli Army at age 18. They were both absolutely fascinating and gave us many recommendations for the rest of Vietnam.
TLDR; Do not stay at LongSon MuiNe Beach Campground Resort, go to Mui Ne for one day to see the sand dunes, avoid the rubbish filled beaches, skip tents in general.