Tour of Tuy Hòa

When we arrived in town, I wrote a request on Facebook asking my Vietnamese friends for recommendations for the area. I was put in touch with a guy who is from here but now lives in Saigon. In turn, he put me in contact with his friend My and we arranged to meet up. After a quick lunch (where we accidentally ordered pig's ear and witnessed a cock fight) we met My and her friend Mai. We rented a motorbike and drove to the beach where we had some rice paper snacks. Then we bought some lemon iced tea to take away and sat on the main bridge with a nice view and chatted together. The girls are really lovely and their English is fantastic.

I'd been told about a famous local delicacy called "mắt cá ngừ" which is a large fish eye. The girls had never had it but we were all interested in at least giving it a go. It was probably as bad as you'd expect. It's served in a small clay pot and inside there are some vegetables and a sauce around a large eye socket, gooey insides and then a smaller white eye-ball which was chewy and chalky. Not something I'll be trying again soon!

We spent some time in a large park area in the centre of town which has large flood lights and small children riding around on bikes with multi-coloured flashing lights. Then we drove up a hill to Tháp Nhạn, a tower built by the Cham people around the 12th century.

We continued our food tour by having bánh bèo (small steamed rice pancakes) at the bottom of the hill and finished with a fantastic dessert called trộn nhãn (longan-flavoured ice cream mixed with creme caramel, peanuts and a bit of coffee).