Travels in Da Nang: The Dragon Bridge, a food tour and meeting people

Da Nang is a city of bridges; we often would cross the Han River using the one of the many bridges on our jaunts around the city, and the most famous is the Dragon Bridge.

The riverfront was one of our favorite walks around the city; the sidewalk was wide, almost completely free of motorbikes, and quiet during the day.

The Da Nang Art Park is not huge, and has some cool statues to investigate while strolling through the park, which is across the street from the river.

As we had a month in Da Nang, we met a lot of people. One night, we went out to a meetup group, that was supposed to be at this working/living digital nomad office, but when we showed up no one was there and the lights were off. The door was open, so we called out hello, but it was kind of creepy, so we waited a bit.

A guy around our age showed up a few minutes later, but he was new to this meetup group too, and asked if we had checked inside. He said he had seen a light on the third floor, so maybe the group was up there? We followed him up the dark stairs, thinking for a moment, are we going to be kidnapped?, but we wound up not finding anyone, and went back downstairs. We asked him if he wanted to get a drink at the bar around the corner, and he agreed.

We had a fun night talking with Paolo, an Italian man from Bologna, who was now living in Da Nang after giving up his businessman job in Switzerland, and could not have been happier. We drank beers, talked life, and about his love of slapstick American movies like Pink Panther and the Naked Gun. It was a fun night and probably better than the meetup group would have been.

Tony, the taxi driver who took us all over Da Nang on a few excursions, shared a love of the World Cup, and, after one of our excursions, took us to the coffee stand that he and his wife had just opened. He bought us coffees and introduced us to his wife and son. During our time together he tell us about Vietnam; we passed by huge cemeteries and he told us that almost all Vietnamese like to be buried; that the food up north was too sweet for him (which is pretty crazy as almost everything has sugar in it here), we would pepper him with questions and he would tell us all we wanted to know. Ever the entrepreneur, Tony was even going to open a car washing/detailing place later this year.

We met an Australian man named Tim, who we met in the hotel lobby one evening, when he was playing guitar with one of the women that worked there, and we all did a little sing-a-long. He told us he was moving full time to Da Nang and had found an apartment overlooking the river; he was quite the character. Another couple we met from New Zealand we would see at breakfast, and later talked with them while walking on the beach in the mornings. Us western tourists would usually have the beach to ourselves during the late morning and early afternoon, which is the hottest and sunniest part of the day, so we took full advantage and worked on our tans.

We did a food and riverboat tour one of our last nights in Da Nang, and it was just us and a retired couple from Australia, Sally and Lou, who’s parents’ originated from southern Italy. They both spoke Italian! It was fun to eat and spend time talking about traveling and my Italian heritage, while getting to share the experiences led by our guide, Turtle. Often times Vietnamese people, especially tour guides and hotel staff, pick a western name or something easier for us to pronounce (Vietnamese is a tonal language, and is definitely not easy to speak). One of the doormen at our hotel went by Chao, for example, which is “hi” in Vietnamese. I asked Turtle what his Vietnamese name was, and he said it meant Turtle in Vietnamese. He was very lively and answered all our questions and together, we had a good time.

The food tour was super fun. We got to try all kinds of Vietnamese food, and visit two local markets. We sampled the food at the local market (Jessica has our shared plate in her hand below), and at the tourist market, we bought some delicious dehydrated strawberries, that the seller told us “had no sugar!” She knew her audience.

The tour ended with the river cruise, that was decent, though we did think it was odd when we went to the boat dock for the tour that Turtle put a surgical mask on (he wore the mask at no other time and had been in some very crowded, indoor spaces). We thought maybe he was hiding from some other tour operators or something? Jesse funnily said maybe he was evading the law. Anyway, we were treated to some watermelon and bottled water before heading out on the river with at least a dozen other brightly lit up boats; the Dragon head did blow fire, but it was surprisingly anti-climatic, though we did have a nice time on the water.

A recurring theme of this trip has been how memorable the people we have been lucky enough to spend time with have been, even if just a really short time. They have been the best and our most favorite part. We had a lot of fun in Da Nang and hope to return one day. Of course, there is no rest for the wicked, as they say, and the devil is always on our heels, so we said good-bye and are on to our next stop in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)!