Nha Trang is Vietnam's most famous beach resort, a city of around 400,000 people wrapped around one of the finest natural bays on the South China Sea. The main beach — a 6 km curve of pale sand backed by coconut palms and, increasingly, a wall of high-rise hotels — is the centre of it all; the water is warm, the bay is ringed by green mountains, and 20 offshore islands shelter some of the best snorkelling and diving in Vietnam. In the past fifteen years Nha Trang has gone from a low-key backpacker town to one of the most developed resort cities in the country, with a direct airport link at Cam Ranh and large numbers of Russian, Chinese and Korean tourists. Love it or hate it, it is the closest thing Vietnam has to a proper beach resort.
Beyond the beach itself, the real attraction of Nha Trang is what lies just offshore. The Hon Mun Marine Protected Area, a cluster of coral-fringed islands in the bay, has the most diverse marine life in the country — over 350 species of hard and soft coral have been identified, and the diving and snorkelling are the best in Vietnam. Most of the dive operators in town offer full-day boat trips to a rotating cast of sites — Madonna Rock, Moray Beach, Electric Nose — and the prices are a fraction of what you would pay for comparable diving in Thailand or the Philippines.
Back in town, the four 8th-to-13th-century Po Nagar Cham Towers on a hill at the north end of the bay are the most important surviving Cham Hindu temples in Vietnam — still used by local Vietnamese-Cham and Vietnamese-Buddhist worshippers. The Long Son Pagoda, with its enormous white Buddha on the hill above the town, and the Nha Trang Cathedral, a striking French-Gothic stone building completed in 1934, are worth short visits. Further afield, the Ba Ho waterfalls and the mud baths at Thap Ba offer classic touristic escapes. The fresh seafood is excellent — Nha Trang is famous across Vietnam for its seafood — and the best of it is found in the unpretentious local places along Trần Phú and in the back streets south of the Cathedral.