The other day at 9:30 a.m., while stepping into a beachside Starbucks in Florida, I noticed that there weren’t many people on the beach itself.  About noon, however, once the comfortable morning temperature had given way to a blanket of hot and humid air, I emerged from Starbucks and found that the beach was packed with bodies, most of them scantily clad.   One could say many things upon observing this scene.  Here is one:  “I am clearly not in Nha Trang.”

Located on the south-central coast of Vietnam, Nha Trang is one of the country’s primary tourist hubs.  Vietnamese and foreigners alike are drawn by its famous broad beach, which runs the length of the city and looks out onto a beautiful bay.   While stretched out on a beach chair the visitor could ponder many things, including the ugly plastic trash that isn’t hard to find in the surf or the fact that the city was once home to a Frenchman named Alexandre Yersin, who discovered the pathogen responsible for Bubonic plague.  In all likelihood, however, most visitors will be giving more thought to their tan line, at least while splayed before the sun.

That is, most foreign visitors will give more thought to their tan line, since they are the ones who will be out en masse at midday, sprawled and sizzling under the tropical rays.  I’m not sure what the Vietnamese tourists will be doing at this time, but here’s one possibility:  reminiscing over their own beach outing at 5:00 a.m. 

Nha Trang, Vietnam

I am writing in vast generalizations here, since you will find Vietnamese on the beach at noon and the odd foreigner on the beach at dawn.  But as a rule the Vietnamese, particularly the women, prefer not to darken or prematurely age their epidermis.  Flailing yourself before the midday sun has simply not been part of their country’s historical development.  They instead have the odd notion that the best time to go to the beach is before the temperature increases or the odds of getting skin cancer rise.  And so, in the spirit of adventure travel, I, who am not a morning person, woke up at dawn to join them.  The following images recount what I saw:

Badminton is a popular sport throughout Vietnam, including at 5:40 a.m.

As is football (soccer)

While many take a dip or engage in sports, others greet the day sitting beside a friend and talking

The beach parking lot

Another difference between Florida and Vietnam is that in Vietnam adults rule the playground

And as the sun grows higher in the sky, the faces on the beach shine golden, including the beautiful faces of these old ladies, whose laughter mixed with all the other sounds of a Nha Trang dawn: the whoof of the badminton shuttlecock, the slap of a soccer ball against a young man's foot, the giggles of girls and the roughhousing of boys.  This is what the sun, some 90 million miles away, was illuminating.  It was also what most foreign visitors, still asleep and still hours from stretching out their towels, were missing.

Joel Carillet, chief editor of Wandering Educators, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, or to follow his weekly photoblog, visit www.joelcarillet.com.