This giant Asian resort has everything – except Aussies
A new Vietnamese resort has got 12 swimming pools – and that’s not counting the many private plunge versions – and one very fun water park. Yet Australian visitors are few.
Wariness gives way to water fun.
I am a woman of, shall we say, a certain age who has turned up on her own at the lazy river ride within the water park at Alma Resort on the south central coast of Vietnam.
It’s late morning and the water park isn’t too busy but all the other guests are in groups, and those groups are without exception made up of one youngish dad and mum to several small children. The lifeguard looks at me with concern. Who’s here to supervise me, his expression seems to say, then it dawns on him that he is.
A beachfront oasis.
For the uninitiated, a lazy river is a shallow(ish) pool that winds around a river-like closed circuit, with the water propelled by a current that carries humans floating on rubber tubes around it at a gentle, yet fun pace, with tipping buckets and other items of watery mayhem along the way.
I ask the lifeguard if he’ll take my photo as I set off. He’s very, very unsure about the whole thing. And when, on my first attempt to get into my rubber tube, I slip and fall on my bottom into the shallow water of the steps, he’s even more so. I struggle back into my tube and away I go with a wave. He takes my photo and patiently waits for me to return – he now has my phone, after all.
He has to wait a while, as around and around I go, with the small kids and their dads doing the same. It’s just so much fun.
Family dining.
Cam Ranh was where a huge bayside military base was situated and used by the US during the Vietnam War. Closed in the 1970s, it’s now an upcoming resort area – Alma Resort is one of the newest.
When I arrive at Alma Resort, I am a bit like that lifeguard – very, very dubious.
It is a 30-hectare sprawling conglomeration of elements, the most alarming to me of which are two huge and not very architecturally attractive tower blocks set to the rear of the property and seemingly looming over it.
In these, 384 of its 580 suites are found and what their encasing lacks in attractiveness they make up for inside. They are enormous one- to three-bedroom, stylishly appointed affairs with balconies affording incredible views of sunsets over Cam Ranh Bay and the South China Sea.
Little known to Australians … Alma Resort, Cam Ranh, Vietnam.
And then there’s the fact that the resort is an absolute river of plenty when it comes to amenities and entertainment – lazy or otherwise. An 18-hole mini-golf course, tennis courts, sports of many kinds including motorised water sports, a 70-seat cinema, 13-treatment-room spa, unbelievably well kitted-out kids’ clubs (two, one each for different age groups), a spectacular array of eateries including a food court and mini-mart – and 12 swimming pools.
That’s not including the water park and also not including the many plunge pools that come with the downstairs apartments in the double-storey “Pavilions”, the super spacious upper-end accommodation set down near the beach in which I am lucky enough to be staying and which seem like a whole other place compared to the area around the towers.
So in the spirit of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, on a morning when my fellow travellers leave the resort and head off on an excursion, I decide to stay and spend the time having a swim in every single one of those 12 pools.
The property is on a large slope and the pools are on terraces that adjoin in a kind of cascade to the sea.
Guest room with balcony.
It’s about 9am, and it’s just me and the gardeners when I take my first dips in the two low-key pools down by the water’s edge, one of them with a bar – a great place for sundowners – accompanying it. At this time, the bar is closed, all is quiet and you can still watch the fishing boats returning from their night’s work.
It’s here I appreciate the fact that Alma Resort has absolute beachfront.
I’m soon swimming in an infinity-edged spectacular pool, 75 metres long and surrounded by lounges and shady huts. It’s got loungers in shallows with bubblers aerating the water. It’s even got waterfalls. I feel like I could stay all day but the “swimmin’ all the pools” mission beckons.
I head to another and I see one lifeguard hasten to get towels for a couple as they arrive and another help somebody blow up their floaty. That’s indicative of the service all over the resort. It is exemplary, despite the size of the place.
In another smaller pool it’s just me and a kid in a blue cap, matching rashie, reef shoes and full-face snorkel who gives me an outraged look as I hop into it with him. I reckon he usually has this little pool to himself, which is why he chooses it. But I tell him I really admire his spectacular snorkel and then I am his splish-splashing compadre.
At the next pool, as I reapply sunscreen, I realise that every pool terrace has toilets. That’s some thoughtful infrastructure.
But wait, there’s more … the resort has 12 pools.
I keep making my watery way up, until I’m at the foot of the towers and reach a kids’ pool into which I am not allowed. I decide to take a buggy to the waterpark, which is where, as I am floating around that lazy river, that Alma Resort makes sense to me. It simply does the big-resort thing brilliantly.
I would come back for the swimming pools alone but one of my favourite elements of the resort ends up being a wide open green space that catches breezes and where families fly kites in the afternoon. Against the backdrop of all the bells-and-whistles built environment, people still gravitate to this simple pleasure, just like me, and the simple pleasure of splashing about in a series of 12 swimming pools for no reason other than they are there.
Alma Resort is – let’s be honest – built for specific markets. The main nationalities here are Vietnamese and when pandemics and wars allow it, Chinese and Russian visitors.
But it also has much to recommend to Australian guests – it just takes me a day full of dips to realise it.
THE DETAILS
Fly
Jetstar flies three times a week from Sydney and four from Melbourne to Ho Chi Minh City. From there, you can fly domestically to Cam Ranh. The airport is only a 10-minute drive from the resort. See jetstar.com
Stay
From about $180 a night, see alma-resort.com.
The writer travelled as a guest of Jetstar and stayed as a guest of Alma Resort.
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