CAM RANH, NHA TRANG – Family resort Alma will welcome the Lunar New Year with a six-day program jam-packed with merriment including its Tet Village which will host an array of traditional games and competitions.
Tet, short for Tet Nguyên Dán, marks the first day of Lunar New Year and is Vietnam’s most significant celebration. It is a time for families to reunite and honour their ancestors. Vietnamese celebrate Tet by cooking traditional dishes, cleaning their houses, visiting relatives and going on pilgrimages. Colours red and yellow are considered to bring fortune and can be seen all around during the celebratory period.
From Lunar New Year’s Eve, Saturday January 21st, until Thursday January 26th, Alma will host festivities including buffet dinners, dragon dances, making lucky envelopes, smashing lucky balloons, and cupcake-making and decorating classes.
Overlooking one of Vietnam’s best beaches, Long Beach, the resort kicks off its Tet program with a floating champagne breakfast, guests trying their hand at crafting the quintessential Tet staple “Banh Chung” Chung cake, wrapping sticky rice and mung bean inside dong leaves at Alma Food Court, a kite flying competition on Alma’s hill, a Tet movie at the Alma Cinema and more.
From the first day of Tet, the 30-hectare resort’s Tet celebrations will be anchored by the lantern-adorned Tet Village at Alma Food Court which comes to life daily from 9am to 6pm with huts brimming with traditional snacks and drinks.
The village’s line-up of traditional activities includes picking lucky envelopes, calligraphy, stilt walking and the folk dance ‘bamboo dance’, with participants tapping and sliding bamboo poles on the ground while dancers step over and in between them. Competitions include ‘smash the watermelon’, whereby blindfolded participants, after being made to spin around, try to hit and break ripe watermelons with a bamboo stick at the direction of the crowd.
“As we bid farewell to the Year of The Tiger, our Tet village will be a hive of activity and festooned in red and gold decorations to symbolize our hope for prosperity and good health for all as we welcome the Year of the Cat and spend quality time with our loved ones,” says Alma’s managing director Herbert Laubichler-Pichler.
Alma Garden will host Vietnamese, Asian and international-themed dinner buffets at Alma Garden on Monday, January 23rd to Wednesday, January 25th. Other activities to be held throughout the resort’s Tet program include mocktail-making classes for adults, and a ‘discovery garden tour’ of the resort’s 1,000 sqm nursery garden, home to bananas, coconuts, papaya, squash, passion fruit, sunflowers, daisies and various local flowers, for the kids.
Le Spa’s two-hour ‘Lunar New Year Retreat’, priced at VND 1,000,000, starts out with a betel nut leaf steam session followed by a ‘Fancy Foot’ massage and ‘Nourishing Shampoo’. The treatment finishes with warm ginger tea with Tet jam, a ginger jam with dried lotus seeds.
Alma’s ‘Lucky Room Package‘ is valid for stays from January 15-31, 2023. It starts at VND 8,900,000 for two nights in a one-bedroom superior suite for two adults and two children inclusive of daily international buffet breakfast at Alma Garden, one dinner for two adults. Other inclusions include a ‘nourishing shampoo’ for two adults at Le Spa, participation in all of the Tet Village’s complimentary activities, and complimentary use of all outdoor sports courts, Splash Water Park, mini golf, the Kids Club and Active Youth Club, the Science Museum and the gymnasium.
To contact Alma or to make a booking, please visit alma-resort.com, call +84 258 399 1666 or email info@alma-resort.com
