This half-day jaunt starts at Ghenh Rang Landscape Park just south of the Hoang Anh Quy Nhon Resort. Take the first left after the resort up the hill. You'll pay 4,000 VND for entry and an additional 2,000 VND for a motorbike to get into the park. The road from there winds its way high above the coast and affords great views back to the busy port and peninsula of Quy Nhon. Stop for a coffee and chat with locals in one of the little roadside stops along the way.

The road through Ghenh Rang leads over a hump of seaside land directly to the Queen's Beach and Quy Hoa Leper Colony (2.5km/1 1/2 miles south of the main beach road, either through Ghenh Rang Park or off of Rte. 1A). The beach out front, named for the wife of Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam, is quite inviting, and a good place (albeit no lounge chairs) to put your feet up. It's refreshingly free of touts and sellers, but actually you'll find that the lack of them means you have to bring all the stuff -- lunch, snacks, an umbrella -- yourself. The leper colony is a tidy set of buildings all fenced in, yet surrounded by the homes of former patients who now live quite full lives. The seaside promenade just in front of the leper colony is picturesque; you'll see a small grove of trees and a gallery of busts of famous scientists and great medical innovators from Greece, England, France, and Vietnam (just one woman, a Vietnamese lady). Look for the bust of Marie De La Passion (1839-1904) near the center of the park; she was a longtime French missionary at the colony. Because of the hard work of colony residents, the whole area is refreshingly free of garbage. You're likely to run into Vietnamese school tours on weekdays, and the "Hello! Wha choo nay?" are fast and thick. Say "Xin chao" (hello) right back.