Digital Nomads: A Week in Ninh Hoa (Vietnam)
In 2022, during our stay in Vietnam, we decided to settle in Ninh Hoa, a fishing village 1.5 hours from Nha Trang. I had been following on Facebook for a long time a Vietnamese entrepreneurs’ club and one of the club’s members had a hotel particularly suited to digital nomads, with half-board facing the ocean.
The hotel sent a driver to pick us up at Nha Trang airport. It’s actually closer to Cam Ranh than to Nha Trang, and it took us 2 hours to get to Ninh Hoa. The flight was incredible—Nha Trang has many more mountains than I remembered, and I got to see Cam Ranh from above. It’s truly an extraordinary and militarily interesting place.
Once we arrived, we were a bit disappointed by the lack of professionalism from the hotel team: the balconies weren’t secured, the rooms weren’t tidy, our workspace was poorly cleaned, and communication was not smooth. They considered themselves elites of the country, but the owner lacked experience and finesse—I think he should have spent some time as a General Manager in a hotel before opening his own. This also teaches me to listen less to people who shower themselves with praise on the Internet 🙂
The beach was very pleasant, the water warm as I like it, but like all beaches in Vietnamese fishing villages, there was quite a bit of trash floating in the water. Moreover, it was sargassum season, which the locals collected to sell (pharmaceutical companies buy it), so even though everyone was picking it up, there were still some floating in the water, and a lot drying on the sand. A not-so-pleasant smell emanated from it. But it was less unpleasant than the sargassum smell in Mexico.
There were two restaurants in the village, open only until noon. If you wanted more variety, you had to wake up around 6 a.m. and have breakfast at the village market. Here, they weren’t used to tourists and made no effort to adapt the recipes. JB got the real Southern Pho recipes (with tons of sugar), and he FINALLY understood why I’d always told him that Southern cuisine wasn’t gourmet.
In the evening, we dined at the hotel, and the food was better (Northern style), but the recipes were too repetitive, so at noon, JB still preferred to eat at the little restaurant with simple dishes right across from the hotel. My mother, after seeing the photos, concluded we ate like paupers and wouldn’t have enough energy to live here. Honestly, I can’t complain, because if I were the one cooking, we’d have eaten even more poorly, ahahaha. Frankly, I was content in this little village, but JB clearly missed some pizza from time to time 😀
To improve the situation, I found two tips to avoid dying of boredom (or hunger):
1/ rent a scooter to go to the nearest town
2/ add seafood options (shrimp, crabs) offered by the hotel
On the day, a motorcycle was delivered to us, and we were thrilled to leave this little fishing village for a few hours. Destination: the beach and its beach bars!! 30 minutes by motorbike. Even though the neighboring village was tiny, we still felt like we were rediscovering civilization because “junk food” was available and the shops were wide open.
On the way back to the small village, we passed by a large factory (for boat manufacturing, I think, for Hyundai), and it was the end of the day, when workers in uniform had to walk to the shuttles that took them back to their villages. This sight really moved us—France has largely deindustrialized in recent decades, and you no longer see thousands of workers streaming out of factories like in Charlie Chaplin’s films. The workers were very surprised to see JB, and JB was surprised to see them 😀 Truly, it was great. Nearby, there’s another factory, for gas, and another for cement. They’re all here because we’re in a stable zone with very few storms, the water is deep, and can accommodate Panamax ships.
It’s here that two other start-ups from the same entrepreneurs’ club have set up: the first to make fish sauce using Japanese methods. The second, a very large farm, for food products (tea, salt, dietary supplements, etc.). I tried a few of their products—pretty good. They know how to do storytelling and motivate resellers. I have a lot to learn from their sales methods.
It was the happiest day in Ninh Hoa, and we told ourselves we could rent a motorbike like that or go on a tour with our hotel. In the evening, JB even got a big plate of shrimp…
Bad surprise
But everything turned upside down around 1 a.m. when JB woke me up, announcing that we had to go to the hospital. After all the junk we’d eaten the day before, I thought it was the food.
I didn’t even know how to wake up the hotel owner; I didn’t have his number since we communicated via apps, but luckily I could call him on Zalo. He hadn’t turned off his phone at night, and one of his employees took JB to the hospital. Fortunately, there was always a car available at the hotel—imagine if we had to wake up the whole village to find a car, or wait for an ambulance? We were 30 minutes from the village clinic and 1.5 hours from Nha Trang. JB was taken to the village, then to Nha Trang, to two different hospitals. He ended up having emergency surgery at the Vietnamese hospital that very afternoon, because the international hospital refused to operate on him, claiming their surgeon was unavailable (yeah right!). In the end, everything went smoothly, but he lost his gallbladder and for several months, I lost my elephant-like memory because I was in shock and had to deal with too many things in a single day. The upside was that since we knew we’d be in the middle of nowhere, I had brought a lot of cash with me, so at least I wasn’t worried about not having enough money to pay the hospital (in Vietnam, you pay first, treatment comes later). Anyway, it was a dreadful day, but by the end of the day, my parents came from Hanoi (they also struggled to find a flight) and we stayed in Nha Trang for a month while JB recovered. After that incident, we concluded that we should always stay close to big cities, just in case… and that being on an island cut off from the world or in a small fishing village could be a really bad idea.
Day tour
The hotel owner and employee handled JB’s transfer very well (and followed my instructions to drop off our belongings at a hotel I’d booked in Nha Trang) so to thank them, my parents contacted them to do a day tour with them (the tour we had planned to take if JB hadn’t been taken to the hospital). The idea was to visit a well-hidden waterfall and Diep Son.
The waterfall has three tiers, and you needed to be in good physical shape to reach the last one, where there was a small, secret natural pool.
Then my parents went to the hotel where we stayed for several days.
They went to visit Diep Son. You couldn’t go there on your own because the main attraction was the sandbar connecting two islands. Due to the changing tides, you had to know the exact time, so you needed people you could call to ask. Going with an agency was a better option.
The irony of fate: during the visit, it started pouring rain, and the small boat that had brought my parents to the island couldn’t leave in such conditions. The waves were too high and it was raining way too much. Fortunately, for the rain, the small restaurant on the island had ponchos for everyone. Then, a family visiting the island at the same time had a much bigger boat and offered to take my parents back with them. They insisted a lot because more people = more stability too. On the phone, the boss was contacting locals to host both the guide and my parents for the night. But luckily, the big boat managed to bring everyone back. The guide then drove my parents back to Nha Trang, safe and sound.
The boss sent me a little message while I was relaxing in Nha Trang, and I didn’t know about the storm, asking if my parents had made it back because he couldn’t get hold of the guide. I barely had time to worry when my parents walked through the door of our apartment in Nha Trang. What an adventure!