Nha Trang: đền tháp và gió biển
Tran Phu · Po Nagar · Hon Chong · Long Son Pagoda
Ảnh minh họa vùng hoặc phương tiện, không phải điểm dừng cam kết. ©
Use the seafront as the spine of a relaxed city day, with a temple visit on either side of lunch. The rock formations at Hon Chong add a short walk without turning the day into a long-distance ride.
A Cham shore with a Vietnamese name
Nha Trang is a Vietnamese city standing on a Cham coast, and even the name is borrowed. Researchers read it as a Vietnamese pronunciation of the Cham Aia Trang — Ea Trang in Rade — which first belonged to the Cái river that comes out to the sea here, and only from 1653 spread to the land around it. For two centuries after that this was a thinly settled corner of Hà Bạc in Vĩnh Xương district, wild enough that the old accounts mention its animals rather than its people. The French made a town of it: a decree of the Governor-General of Indochina on 30 August 1924 turned Nha Trang into a centre urbain, another on 7 May 1937 raised it to a commune, and only on 30 March 1977 did it become a city under a province. The newest change is administrative too — since the reorganisation in force from 1 July 2025 the former city has been divided into wards of Khánh Hòa province, one of which is simply named Nha Trang. Nobody on the seafront talks that way. They say Nha Trang, and so do we.
The towers above the river mouth
Cross the Xóm Bóng bridge and the oldest thing in the city is on the hill to your left. Po Nagar stands on Cù Lao mountain above the mouth of the Cái, and it was already a sanctuary of the Cham principality of Kauthara before 781: a stele of that year records king Satyavarman restoring the temple after raiders had destroyed it. Gifts follow through the centuries — the commander Senapati Par in 817 under Harivarman I, an order of Indravarman III in 918 to cast a golden statue of the goddess, and later the Khmer king Jayavarman VII carrying the lingas away. The goddess is Yan Po Nagar, mother of the country, identified with the Hindu Bhagavati and, after the Vietnamese took the site over in the seventeenth century, worshipped as Thiên Y Thánh Mẫu. Three levels survive, the upper one with two rows of brick towers and a main tower about 25 metres high; on its east face Durga kills the buffalo demon in the Trà Kiệu manner of the tenth or eleventh century. In the third lunar month the courtyards are packed: this is a working temple, not a ruin.
The doctor who stayed
What Nha Trang is known for at home, besides the beach, is science, and it begins with one man. Alexandre Yersin, Swiss-French, was a ship's doctor on the Saigon–Manila and Saigon–Haiphong runs from 1890 when the French government sent him to Hong Kong in June 1894, into an outbreak that had already killed a hundred thousand people; fifteen days later he had isolated the plague bacillus that now carries his name. He returned to Indochina, set up a laboratory at Nha Trang in 1895 to make the anti-plague serum — it became a branch of the Pasteur Institute in 1905 — and never left again. He took a concession at Suối Dầu in 1897 and pioneered rubber, opened a station at Hòn Bà in 1915 where he acclimatised the cinchona tree, and those trees covered Indochina's quinine needs through the Second World War. He died at his house here in 1943; the house is now the Yersin Museum, and his gravestone calls him a benefactor and humanist venerated by the Vietnamese people. The Institute of Oceanography, founded on 14 September 1922 as the fisheries and oceanography service of Indochina, is the second half of the same story.
A bay of nineteen islands
The water you ride beside is a bay of about 507 square kilometres with nineteen islands in it: the largest is Hòn Tre at 32.5 km², the smallest Hòn Nọc at roughly four hectares. Its dry season runs from January to August and the rain from September to December, the opposite of the north, which is why the beach is crowded in June and empty in the weeks before Christmas. Around Hòn Mun the reefs carry some 350 coral species, the richest in the country, and since 2001 that island and its neighbours have been inside a marine protected area. The cliffs of the outer islands are also where the swiftlets build: yến sào, the edible nest, is a Khánh Hòa industry, collected off bamboo scaffolding on sea cliffs after the birds start nesting between late March and mid-May. None of it is reachable on a motorcycle — boats and permits are a separate day — but it explains half the shop windows in town.
How to ride a city that is one long beach
Nha Trang is easy riding and simple to read: Trần Phú runs the whole length of the sand, the old centre sits behind it on a grid, and everything in this guide fits into about twenty-five kilometres. Go north first, while the light is still low — the seafront to Hòn Chồng, then Po Nagar over the bridge — turn inland to Long Sơn before midday, keep the cathedral and the Yersin house for the flat hours of the afternoon, and finish six kilometres south at Cầu Đá with the Institute of Oceanography, because it is indoors and cool. Two things apply all day. The Ngã Sáu six-way roundabout under the cathedral has no lane discipline and needs a slow, predictable line. And both the pagoda and the towers mean long flights of steps: leave the riding boots loose or take something else to walk in.
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Hướng dẫn viên thuộc đội của chúng tôi, tuyến đường chúng tôi đã tự chạy, và bạn có một kênh trò chuyện với chúng tôi suốt chuyến đi.
- Hướng dẫn viên từ đội của chúng tôi
- Những tuyến đường chúng tôi đã tự chạy
- Xưởng của chúng tôi tại 5 thành phố và các xưởng đối tác
- Một kênh trò chuyện với chúng tôi suốt chuyến đi
- 16
- thành phố
- 24
- tour
- 71
- hành trình
- 6
- xưởng