Da Nang: Coastal City on the River Bank

Da Nang is a coastal city nearly the size of San Jose. It may be as culturally relevant as well. I have nothing bad to say about San Joser, in fact, I fully enjoyed my time there and look forward to visiting again. It's just that San Jose isn't usually involved in discussions about artistic and cultural importance in the US, and you got the feeling that Da Nang could be the same way. It was, though, an urban city that was ripe for exploration.

There were some white folks, but it wasn't like most of the other places we visited. We arrived late that first night, took a cab to our resort, and the next day we went off to Hoi An. The next day, we went off to Da Nang proper to get around.

A large river separates the mainland section of the city from the peninsular section, an area that has many of Da Nang city's own beachy resorts...we stayed way south, outside of the river's drainage. The Han River, named for the great Chinese dynasty, is spanned by four bridges. One, possibly my favorite urban bridge, is known as the "dragon bridge". See for yourself why:

The head and face are off at the other side of the bridge, away from my camera, but they looked pretty cool.

When we visit cities like this, especially outside the country, we try our best to get lost back in the density of where the real people live. "Get lost" isn't the right phrase, because we're never really lost, and we generally know how to return to a main thoroughfare. But we specifically try to get off the beaten path and get to where people look at us with that wild "Crazy white people" look in their eye.

That's how we ended up in here, one of the neatest parts of the walk:

The Han Market is the largest market in Da Nang, and has an entrance along the road the river. We were dropped off there by the shuttle. It was mostly too early when were there, because we wanted to get a look at fabrics. The food stalls were mostly bustling. The following picture is taken from one a stairwell landing, and shows just a tiny portion of the market:

Before we got ourselves back into the cut, we needed some breakfast. We first stopped at what we thought was a cafe. It did serve tea and what the folks call "coffee", but no food. We were sitting outside along the sidewalk, and across the street there was a restaurant populated with locals.

We headed over and took a seat. Below is the establishment, the Tien Hung:

Funny thing: there was no English writing on the menu. So, as we looked at it a waitress came over, nodded slightly, and made the finger sign for "two", like the peace sign. We nodded back and returned to the menu. Before long a plate arrived with greens and sprouts, and then two bowls of noodles and broth, and some weird loaf-meat slices. It was a play on the traditional Asian breakfast. Who knows what the hell the menu was for...

Another thing we did in Da Nang was go to the Cham Sculpture Museum. The Cham people were an Austronesian group that populated the central coastline of today's Vietnam. They were historically pushed around, and today make up one of the minority groups in Vietnam (and, incidentally, Laos and Cambodia). They were quite the sculpture-mad society, and there was a museum dedicated to them. Their talent is unmistakable:

There were shirts for sale in certain quarters of tourist zones that had a facsimile of the following picture with the title "Vietnam Telecom" (I love the jumbled wire look):

One thing we found out about and wanted to see was a brew-pub restaurant billing itself as the Tulip Czech Beer. The beer was less than great, and the menu had the first bit of shocking morsels that we'd seen in nearly two weeks. Check out number eleven:

There was another cool bridge we went out to take a look at and photograph. That's what happens when you're on foot and exploring a city, you go see the things you can actually see. I don't remember the name of it, but it was dynamic:

After our last activity in Da Nang, a massage anecdote that will appear later in an "Aside", we took a taxi back to the resort. Once there we tried to take it easy. The next day we had three flights to catch and one of the longest days. We hung out at the pool and the beach and later organized our gear for the flights.

The trip was coming to a blurry end...