If, like us, you arrived in Nha Trang at 0630, broken and dizzy under the weight of a sleepless night and an oversize backpack, you could be forgiven for mistaking Nha Trang for an off-season Costa del Sol resort. Unlit neon signs for All Day Happy Hours, Full English Breakfasts, Guinness on Draught and the Premier League loom large in the bar windows lining the beachfront. Having gathered this slightly inauspicious first impression en-route to our hotel, we collapsed for 4 hours of well-deserved sleep.

Feeling more like fully-functioning human beings after our naps, we set off to visit the some of the sights of Nha Trang. First stop, the thermal mud baths just outside of town. First mistake, hiring bicycles and setting off into the mid-morning traffic.

I think we've already established that the rules of the road are pretty sketchy in Vietnam, and that the number of moped riders and number of riders per moped beggars belief (We saw 5 on a 50cc moped the other day - a man, a woman carrying a baby, a kid upfront between the man and the handlebars, and a kid perched on the back mudguard. The guy was driving one-handed, talking on a mobile phone, weaving through rush-hour traffic). In retrospect, as a caring fiancé, this was perhaps not the safest environment into which to send a fairly novice cyclist like Sarah. She was totally fine cycling in Japan and China, but two minutes after setting off in Nha Trang I looked back over my shoulder, saw her knuckles white on the handlebars, and wondered if maybe this wasn't such a good idea. Two minutes later, I was very sure it wasn't.

Ironically, it wasn't the traffic that did the damage. I pointed this out a couple of days later once the bruising had gone down a little, and got a well-deserved death-stare in response. (NB. Sarah just read this, two weeks later, and I got the same stare. I suggest we not mention this again).

What actually happened was, I slowed and stopped by the side of the road to check Sarah was OK, and she slowed down and wobbled to a stop just behind me. What she didn't notice though, was that she had stopped right next to a storm drain, so that when she went to put her foot down to steady herself she touched nothing but air, and, off-balance with a look of total shock on her face, plunged her leg down into the (full) drain up to her knee, pulling the bike down with her.

We were really lucky that she didn't cut herself, and had a bottle of water to clean off the sewage, but Sarah did knock her knee pretty badly on the concrete drain cover. My offering of the traditional O'Connor words of comfort for situations like these: 'It's nothing – just a scratch' very nearly earned me a matching injury. Once we'd cleaned the wound we abandoned the mud baths, and pushed our bikes back home.

So after this eventful morning, Nha Trang wasn't our favourite place. But it redeemed itself in our eyes as the sun went down.

In the afternoon we visited (by taxi) a set of Cham Dynasty temples on a hill overlooking the bay. The Cham dynasty ruled the area for over a thousand years, but few remnants of their civilisation and architecture remain. Apparently the buildings are very similar to those at Angkor – the Cham were actually neighbours of the Khmer who built Angkor, and they made several forays over the border including one in 1177 in which they killed the Khmer king and ransacked the capital.

We then headed back into town to the beach (again, by taxi) . The beach is absolutely fantastic – a long clean curve of sand and warm gentle waters. A kind of timeshare system operates here, with Westerners burning themselves to a crisp from 9 to 5, and happy locals enjoying the beach at sunrise and sunset.

When we got there the beach was packed with kids playing football and burying their friends in the sand, parents teaching babies (and small dogs) to swim in the surf, and teenagers flirting by their mopeds. As the sun descended the sky became crowded with kites.