National Oceanographic Museum of Vietnam
Destination
Ad: no.1 Cau Da, Nha Trang City, Khanh HoaOpen Hours: 6.00AM - 6.00PM
Best for: family, Children, couple..
Founded in 1923, about 5km from Nha Trang City Center, the Museum of Oceanography is meant for storage of artifacts (animals and non-animals) collected up until now from the ocean, and also a witness of crucial evidences of oceans all over the country and through different eras.
Traveling to the museum, besides admiring hundreds of beautiful tropical sea animals, visitors can also survey and dig into over 10,000 preserved marine creatures in the East Sea, in the archipelagoes of Paracels (Hoàng Sa) and Spratlys (Truong Sa), shore regions of Vietnam. A sample collection of marine creatures comprises existing species in the seas of Vietnam, Cambodia and adjacent waters, and notably many rare species on the verge of extinction such as dugongs. Particulary the museum also stores and displays a gigantic whale skeleton of nearly 18m long and 3m high that was buried deep beneath the Rouge Delta for at least over 200 years.
- The collection of this museum spreads out over two floors. The ground floor is home to fish tanks of varying sizes that house all manner of marine life. All kinds of fish you would find in the sea area of Khanh Hoa Province are presented there: reef sharks, turtles, living coral, anemones, puffers, lionfish, clownfish, sea horses, and a whole array of colorful reef species, some of which can be found in no other place in the world. Each of them has a label indicating their name, origin and characteristics in Vietnamese and in English.
- The upstair flooor is for exhibiting specimens, local boats and fishing artifacts, plus an 18 metre long whale skeleton. Over its long history, this museum has been holding more than 20000 specimens of tropical marine creatures. Apart from the real fishes, there are also rare species’ skeletons or bodies preserved in formaldehyde solution. There are even finds of endemic species from Kampuchean Vietnamese seas and from other nearby countries, some of which are extremely rare, like the dugong or sea cow. Kids are often very excited to visit the big tropical turtles and crocodiles.