We left Ho Chi Minh City about 9.30 and took a taxi to Phan Thiet, about three hours up the coast. This was perhaps the most exciting part of the adventure as we were going to meet up with Adam, Ava and the girls. The exciting part was that the girls did not know we were coming.
We texted Adam when we were about ten minutes away and he met us at the entrance to the Mövenpick Resort, a magnificent and luxurious hotel right on the beach. He went up to their room and we followed a few minutes afterwards. When we knocked, Jessie opened the door and, I think for the first time, I witnessed an eye-popping, jaw-dropping reaction from someone who was very surprised! Hugs and cuddles all round.
As you can see, Jessie had suspected something was up but the surprise was magnificent nevertheless.
We got settled in our bedroom which, coincidentally, happened to be right next door to theirs with a door connecting the two. As you might imagine, there was a lot of traffic going back and forth between the two rooms.
After we were settled, Jessie showed us around the hotel and we spent most of the rest of the day in one of the three swimming pools on site.
Dinner in the hotel restaurant was very good.
The Mövenpick Hotel is part of a larger development all along the beach – Nova World.
Penny and I took ourselves for a stroll along the beach which sadly is littered with plastic detritus. We did run across a team of four or five Vietnamese trying to collect the plastic and clean up the beach but I am afraid they were fighting a losing battle.
As the resort is about 10 km south of the town of Phan Thiet, there wasn’t a lot to see or do other than enjoy the various facilities the hotel has to offer. The girls enjoyed Kids Club each day where they indulged in a bit of arts and crafts as well as enjoying a children’s movie each evening.
Swimming, of course, was always a popular pastime.
On our last full day at the resort Penny and I took a stroll up and around some of the holiday houses which were also part of the whole Nova World development. There were very few people about (as was the case with the hotel) and one did wonder how these places were turning a profit. We gather, though, that they fill up at the weekend when scores of Vietnamese descend on the place. Still, there are a lot of unoccupied accommodation.
Next time – the long and winding road from Phan Thiet to Đà Lạt, a crazy house, a cable car and rollercoaster. Hold on to your hat.
A busy week – the glorious weather has (largely) continued – we did have one damp and drizzly day and another with gale force winds which brought biting temperatures. But, on the whole, our clear, bright blue skies with modest temperatures have continued. Lovely, but we are going to need some rain soon.
We’ve been largely labouring in the garden this week, taking advantage of the decent weather. Penny has been toiling on a major project which has lain dormant for some time and, when I can’t create a convenient excuse, I’ve been helping or at least trying not to hinder her. More on that when it gets closer to completion.
We had a nice meal out at The Crown in Weston on Thursday evening. Just as we arrived and placed our order, the power went off and we were stuck wondering if we would get to eat that evening. We nursed our drinks and after about fifteen or twenty minutes the power came back on. Hooray! We will get to have some dinner after all! The meal was tasty enough although Penny did, once again, struggle to find something for a pescatarian that wasn’t fish and chips.
YCNMIU
I guess you will have heard about the Harvard-educated economist Ron Vara who is helping to formulate the current tariff policy at the White House. Or, at least, his alter ego, Peter Navarro, is advising the president on economic matters. I ran across the following somewhere (sorry to say I cannot remember where).
Trump’s tariff policies aren’t just misguided—they are built on the bizarre fantasies of Peter Navarro, who literally invented a fake economist to back his ideas. Meet “Ron Vara,” a fictional Harvard-educated expert Navarro created (and conveniently named as an anagram of himself) to lend credibility to his protectionist trade theories. I honestly can’t believe this story is true but unfortunately it is. This made-up expert appears in a half dozen of Peter Navarro’s books dating back to 2001 and this imaginary character became the intellectual backbone of Trump’s tariff policy, which were sold as a way to save American jobs but instead wreaked havoc on the economy.
The results were predictably disastrous. The tariffs acted as a tax on U.S. consumers and businesses, driving up prices and provoking retaliatory measures from trading partners like China. Farmers suffered, markets tanked, and allies were alienated—all while Navarro insisted this chaos was a “necessary overhaul.” In reality, it was economic malpractice wrapped in pseudo-populist rhetoric.
Is there a better metaphor encapsulating Trump tanking the entire global economy based on the intellectual findings of a fictional character with no real data to back up a single thing he said? This debacle is a case study in what happens when policy is driven by ego and fiction instead of facts. Navarro’s made-up economist became the blueprint for a trade war that left the U.S. economy battered and its global credibility in shambles.
Yep, you could not make this shit up.
And finally, I meant to include this photo last week in anticipation of last Thursday’s milestone – it would have been my folks’ 77th wedding anniversary. Thank goodness these crazy young kids got together all those years ago. Happy Anniversary!
Meanwhile, keep breathing, keep happy, keep smiling, keep exercising, be good, be careful, and keep safe. And be gentle to wasps and bees – we need all the pollinators we can get.
Lots of love to you all,
Greg