Mui Ne confused me. I had driven down from Dalat expecting a beach town, and a beach town is what I got for the first hour — a long strip of resorts, seafood shacks, and a coastline cluttered with fishing boats. Then a kitesurfer told me to rent a scooter and head out to the dunes at dawn, and the next morning everything I thought about this place rearranged itself. Behind the beach, Vietnam keeps a desert. Not metaphorically. An actual landscape of sand the colour of apricots, sculpted by a wind that comes off the South China Sea and never quite settles down.
The Dunes
There are two sets of dunes and they could not be more different. The Red Dunes sit close to town — smaller, the colour of rust, and overrun by children renting plastic sleds to anyone willing to slide down a sand slope on their backside. Lia did it twice and refused to admit she enjoyed it. The White Dunes, forty minutes further out, are the real spectacle: pale, enormous, and rippling in a way that makes you forget you are in Southeast Asia at all. We arrived before sunrise, which is the only sensible time to come, because by mid-morning the sand is a griddle and the quad-bike rental men descend like seagulls. We climbed to the top of the highest ridge as the light turned the whole valley gold, and a freshwater lake appeared at the base of the dunes, fringed with lotus flowers. A desert with a lake in it. Vietnam keeps surprising me like this.
The Fairy Stream and the Boats
Back near town there is a place called the Fairy Stream, which sounds like a tourist trap and largely is, but I loved it anyway. You take off your shoes and walk ankle-deep up a shallow warm creek that has carved its way between formations of red and white clay, little canyons that look like a miniature Bryce Canyon someone built for a film set. It takes twenty minutes and ends, anticlimactically, at a small waterfall and a man selling coconuts. The charm is in the walking — the cool water, the bare feet, the absurd beauty of the eroded cliffs glowing in the sun.
Mui Ne is still a working fishing village underneath the tourism, and that is its saving grace. The round basket boats — the thung chai, woven from bamboo and waterproofed with resin — bob in the bay by the hundreds, and at dawn the fishermen come in with the night’s catch and sell it on the sand before the market even opens. I sat on the seawall one morning with a Vietnamese coffee, watching the boats come in, and a fisherman shared a few words and a cigarette with me despite us having no language in common. That, more than any dune, is what I remember.
The Wind
The wind is the reason this town exists in its modern form. From November to April it blows steadily, and Mui Ne has become one of the great kitesurfing destinations in Asia. I am not a kitesurfer — I tried once in Mexico and spent more time underwater than above it — but watching dozens of kites arc across the bay at sunset, while the dunes glow orange behind them, is its own kind of meditation. I drank a cold Saigon beer, did absolutely nothing, and considered it a perfect afternoon.
When to go: December to April for reliable wind and dry skies. The dunes are best at sunrise; bring water and leave before the heat and the quad bikes arrive.