nemothecaptain

On 9/3/2018 at 3:56 PM, roberts2005 said:

How long is the walk to the outer gate where you meet the guide. I have read everything from 10 minutes to 20 minutes

Hi roberts2005, here below you can see the map: meeting point could be either location 1 or 2 and the distance is no more than 500m (i.e. 5 minutes).  With Royal Caribbean Ovation Of The Seas on Oct 16, 2018 the tenders where doking at "Princess" point in the map and our meeting was at point "1".

Port of Call: Nha Trang Nha Trang

tour name: Nha Trang Special Countryside + River Cruise

Organized by: Dung Pham tours
$60 USD/person for a group of 10 tourists

Vessel: Ovation of The Seas, RC, 16 oct 2018

This was our 2nd visit to Nha Trang port.  Having done in 2017 a Royal Carribean Nha Trang city tour, and having being somehow disappointed, this time I was looking for a more real-life oriented tour with a smaller group of people.
After having evaluated several options through Internet I can say that the Dung Pham tours was the winning choice: Dung Pham is offering small groups tailored tours also allowing great interaction and proactivity to help looking for the necessary fellows passengers, each of them dealing directly with him for the final arrangements.  
Our group was supposed to be 9 people but unfortunately 2 fellow passengers had a last minute problem and could not participate, but this did not affect the schedule and the price per person.

We easily met our guide Denny just at the entrance of the port (some 500 mt from the tenders drop point), unfortunately quite late around 9:30 (while they were waiting for us since 7:30!!) due to long debarcation time via RC tenders, so our excursion -that was taking the whole day in Nhat Trang- had to be trimmed a little. Originally our guide Danny, mr. Dang Nguyen, didn't mean to visit the Orphanage, but a nice couple in our group that did this tour one year ago recommended this visit so we re-arranged the schedule and included the orphanage plus the embroidery factory as well (they wanted to purchase something), but we had to trim the ancient house and the Ponagar Cham temple.

So we went first to purchase some food as offer for the orphanage in a local market (an experience by itself!!) and then headed to the Cai river for the river cruise. This was an opportunity to see a slice of local life along the river: rice paddies, fishermens, beautiful scenery along the banks, orchards and farmers. We stopped under a very intersting wooden "toll" bridge for motorcicles, linking a river island.
Then we visited a house with 2 ladies weaving mats from rushes which grow nearby. The working process is very rural, it was interesting to see such type of artisanal work since surely won't last for long:  two ladies working together can weave four mats a day, sold or traded at very low price.
After that we visited the Pagoda Orphanage: here some Buddhist noons and other volunteers care of 25 abandoned children plus handle a charity school for around 100 kids of poor families. This was very interesting and touching moment. We delivered our small gifts to the kids and they singed a thanksgiving song for us.
Then we had a good local lunch in a very pleasant restaurant veranda on the Cai river, under the shadow of some trees. During the lunch mr. Dung Pham reached us and surprised me offering a wonderful delicious birthday cake: it was my birthday and I didn't even remember to have communicated my birthday date to him, and the surprise was really great and unexpected, contributing to make this day even more special to me. We shared the cake after lunch with joy.
After lunch we visited a Conical hat making family: two ladies (mother and daugther) are making the traditional conical hats and it was very interesting to admire the manual skill and the work behind.
The following visit to a Rice paper making location was really interesting: the thin rice paper used to wrap spring rolls are made from steamed rice and processed in a very primitive way into round piece that are later dried in the sun on bamboo brackets.
We then reached a hill to visit the 48 mtrs tall Amitabha Buddha statue.
After we had a 30 minutes stop in Dam Market, a place plenty of cheap tourist supply but also some interesting local foods. I would personally have avoided this stop.
The last stop was the embroidery factory where some valuable piece of arts are produced, for a quite high price.
We went back to ship 30 minutes before the last tender.

The tour was good and interesting, surely better than the equivalent offered by Royal Caribbean that we took last year. My only recommendation would be to insist to include the ancient Ponagar Cham temple, that I visited last year and I believe should not be missed, since this looks like the most interesting historical spot in the area (while for example the Amitabha Buddha statue is quite modern and could be skipped without regrets).