How Vietnam's Mui Ne became a Southeast Asian watersports hotspot

Standing on the beach in the southern Vietnamese fishing village of Mui Ne, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. Before me, the South China Sea is glistening in the late-morning sun, murmuring softly, lapping the white sand and fragmented scallop shells that lie scattered at my feet. All around me is a hive of activity. Under the shade of a ramshackle tented workshop, with colourful tarpaulins stretched across upright poles of driftwood, fisherfolk are mending boats and detangling nets. In the shallows, women in conical hats sieve the day’s catch — sweet sea snails, gargantuan shrimp, blue crabs — and stir anchovies in great fermenting vats. Mui Ne is famous for its fish sauce, and even in this embryonic state its pungent odour fills the air, so thick I feel I could reach out and grasp it.

On the water’s surface bobs a fleet of coracles — small, round bamboo fishing boats — alongside elegant, longer-prowed vessels with bright bodies of yellow, blue and green, their sterns painted with sets of piercing eyes. It’s the boats that are watching me.

Once just a somnolent fishing village, Mui Ne has grown dramatically in recent years, with a bevy of luxurious resorts and activity clubs springing up along the five-mile beach that sprawls south of the village. Many have arrived in the wake of its burgeoning reputation as one of the watersports capitals of Southeast Asia, thanks to the strong winds that buffet the beach, courtesy of the southwest monsoon from June to September and the northeast monsoon the rest of the year. To find out more, I’ve made an appointment with Mui Ne Sailing Club at the other end of the town’s long beach.

I’m greeted warmly with a high-five by Nguyen Tan Hung, a kitesurfing instructor whose salt-and-pepper hair mirrors a lifestyle seasoned by the sea. “I have seawater for blood,” he says with a grin. Tan’s father was a fisherman, and so was he, before Mui Ne’s emerging watersports scene drew him into the world of kitesurfing. His childhood was spent around the boats whose eyes were burning a hole into me on the beach earlier. “They represent Nam Hai,” he says. “The whale god.”

He explains the fisherfolk of Mui Ne practise a folk religion that pre-dates even the arrival of Buddhism two millennia ago. It makes deities of the whales — thought to be Bryde’s whales — that frequent this coastline and are said to protect those caught in storms, carrying them and their capsized boats away from the maelstrom on their barnacle-encrusted backs. “I totally believe in it,” Tan says. “My father’s seen it happen.”

The same winds that have long compelled stormbound fisherfolk to pray for protection are what’s brought kitesurfers, windsurfers, sailors and surfers to Mui Ne. The beach here typically sees 260 days each year with wind over 12 knots. Today, though, the seas are experiencing a rare calm spell. Modest waves mean the conditions are perfect for my first-ever surfing lesson. Between wobbles, splashes and a few proud upright seconds on the board, Tan tells me how much his town has changed.

“Nobody knew about Mui Ne until 1995, when thousands of people came to the beach to watch the total solar eclipse,” he says. “After that, nothing was the same.” The eclipse-hunters found much to enjoy in Mui Ne: soft white- and red-sand dunes, shaded with casuarina trees, backing onto an arc of golden beach lapped by reliable waves. The kitesurfers among their number, though, were most taken by the perpetually strong winds. Word quickly spread among those looking for quieter alternatives to watersports hotspots in Thailand and the Philippines.

Surfing lesson completed, I take a taxi down Mui Ne’s long beachside drag to Van Thuy Tu, a curious temple that Tan had recommended. I’m met at the entrance by the smartly dressed custodian, Ly Nham, who shows me around. On the face of it, the temple looks typical of the Chinese-influenced shrines found across Southeast Asia: pavilion roofs ornamented with sculptures of lions and dragons, and drums of joss sticks smouldering before a vermilion altar, wreathing fearsome statues and bowls of votive dragon fruit in a veil of perfumed smoke.

But something is different about this place. In the outdoor courtyard and the dimly lit interior there sit little wooden models of colourful fishing boats with staring eyes, like those I’d seen in the harbour. A mosaic on the wall depicts a stricken fishing boat being carried from a seething whirlpool by a colossal whale. Nham leads me behind the altar, to show me that it’s propped up by a huge glass case filled with thousands of whale bones, which have washed up here over the centuries.

Some of the biggest jawbones must be 13ft long, as tall as the temple hall itself — but that’s nothing compared to what awaits us in the next room, which is taken over by a complete fin whale skeleton, stretching more than 65 feet from top to tail. “The largest whale skeleton in Southeast Asia,” Nham says, with a reverential bow. “The temple was built in 1762 and then, in 1800, this washed up on the beach. But whales were saving fishermen long before that. They’re our guardian angels.”

I head back to Mui Ne, walking through the soft sand of the dunes and along a peaceful riverbed known as the Rose Canyon, whose hoodoo-like rock formations turn a fiery red as the afternoon melts into a tranquil, wind-free evening. Stopping back at the Sailing Club for a sundowner, I bump into Tan, who greets me with a shrug and a grin. “The whale god has calmed the wind. He’s looking out for fishermen this week, not kitesurfers.”