Tuy Hòa: Scandia, the unknown

One of my dream travel is to go along Viet Nam by train, and stop by each station and discover the whole length of my long country.

That would take months, and I haven't got time for that. However, I travelled to Tuy Hoa by train from Da Nang, and then also by train from Tuy Hoa to Nha Trang. We took the train at around 10 pm from Da Nang station, and the train would arrive at 7 the next day in Tuy Hoa city. We spent a night sleeping on the train. Train in Viet Nam is not advanced technology, but it's not too bad, and it costs so little. We share bunkbeds with 2 other people.

In Tuy Hoa, we had already booked an accomodation named Scandia Resort. You can look the place up on TripAdvisor / Booking.com. The place is owned by a Swedish man and his Vietnamese wife, and the name Scandia reminds of something Scandinavian too. On TripAdvisor or Google something, I don't remember, the place was rated like 7 points, and there were some complaints about its quality, including:

- Place too hard to find, even taxi drivers don't know where it is

- The standard is much lower to be called a resort

- Too scary at night, too many animals, no light, no internet, no wifi, no even mobile service

- There is a swimming pool but it is always dry.

Quickly, we recognized these complaints are from basic metropolis citizens who go on vacation to seek the same comfort they have in big cities. First of all, Scandia is out of the city center, that city is not a big one though, and on the beach. It has its own beach, covered by nature pine forrest (phi lao is the name of the pine) and a lot of wild trees. It is secluded from the town. And who the hell want a swimming pool when they are right on the beach of the Pacific Ocean that is actually kilometers in lenght? Ok Ok to be honest we were a bit nervous too when we chose Scandia, but we chose it anyway because that sounded like we would have the whole resort for ourselves.

And we did! The place is so big, that even if it was full we could still have had a good time. Again, it is covered in nature. In the morning, we woke up naturally to birds singing, and at night, there is no light at all, I could see all the stars in the galaxy, which I never could before, because I come from light polluted city. We were lucky we stayed there in full moon nights, and the moon was so big and clear, reflecting itself into the deep Pacific Ocean sea. Pictures above are about the beach running through Scandia. The beach is long, well Viet Nam itself is a long beach. But it's totally wild, no one is there to manage it. It's super clean and untouched. No tourists, no one at all, no stores, nothing there, only two fishermen that we found later. The Pacific Ocean looked majestic, the water was beautiful in aquamarine color, but it did not look very Pacific. Not huge waves there were, but I always have this fear toward the ocean. I love the ocean at the same time, it's a complicating relationship. It looked like it is so majestic, and hiding so many secrets that I didn't dare to discover. Therefore I stayed on shore.

One morning we woke up in Scandia, and it was very foggy. The birds woke us up to blurry panorama. We couldn't see further than some meters. The air was fresh, moist and so cool. It was really calming. We ran to the ocean to see how it looked like, and it looked even more mysterious:

From here if you keep on swimming, swimming, you can reach to the Americas. But looking into the thick fog covering the ocean, I thought it would lead us to Kraken. I would not be surprised if scary creatures walked out of the fog.

The moist formed tiny water drops on flowers in the garden of the resorts, making it look like a fairy tale.

This province is the furthest East of Vietnam, if you see a geological map you will see that the deep ocean is very close to this land. That means the ocean gets deep very quickly, and we could see huge ships very close to the shore. At night, Scandia still has electricity, but it was only enough to use in each house. Around, it was totally dark, but was not dark at all for the moonlight so bright. We used a star map app to track all the stars on the Heaven, and it was just breath taking, mind blowing, and jaw dropping for me to see the galaxy in such details with my own eyes. As it felt something scary even though I still enjoyed it, I knew that I had been too blinded in the eyes by the light of the city.

After all the places I have been staying during my travel, I think Scandia was the most impressive of all. Now after two years, I'm not sure if there is any change, BUT I HOPE THERE IS NOT. Tuy Hoa, like the rest of Vietnam, is becoming urbanized and touristic. Soon around Scandia and along that wonderful wild beach, there will be a lot of resorts that will satisfy the tastes and needs of metropolis citizens, air conditioned, wifi covered, swimming pool (again wtf), international food. That is great, my country is getting rich. But I feel sad in some way.

However, I'm happy enough that I was in Tuy Hoa in 2017, and I saw the beauty of a nature beach on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. This was the region impressed me the most.

I also spent severy days there discovering other untouched gems of Phu Yen, the province that holds Tuy Hoa. I will share to you in the next posts!