Vietnam (iii): Mountains, Bombs, Kings

On one my weekends in Da Nang I took a drive out into the countryside to the neighboring mountains and went through a traditional village. Departing Da Nang made for a dramatic transition from a dense urban sprawl to sparse farming villages. The drive wove steadily up a valley inland along a river under an overcast sky and intermittent drizzles. After a couple of hours I stopped by the river to cross a rickety, rain-slicked suspension foot-bridge to reach a historic village home to an indigenous ethnic group called the Co Tu.

I wandered about the village and met curious mutts, was shown blast craters leftover from the Vietnam War and a bell made from an old bomb casing (on which the US Marines serial number is still visible), and was served a traditional Vietnamese meal. It was a pretty sobering thing to see the relics and lasting impact of the war as still a reality for these people. I also met a man that was the former king of the Co Tu. He put on his traditional garb and played a number of instruments to demonstrate traditional Co Tu music. He also showed me the dragon emblazoned coffin he's already hand-carved for himself, his old Soviet-era war medals, and a portrait painted of him with Stalin. He was a badass old dude.

I also made my way to the famous Marble Mountains just aside Da Nang. The Marble Mountains are a series of large rock formations jutting starkly upward from a flat coastal plain, each one named after one of the five elements. They were shelters for resistance fighters during the war; snipers held positions at their peaks and a network of caves provided safe havens. They're now filled with Buddhist carvings, statues, and pagodas. At this point they're mostly a tourist attraction with villages of shops surrounding the base of the mountains and hawkers crawling over every inch of their paths. Nevertheless, making my way to the top of Thuy Son (Water Mountain) was still enjoyable. Somehow there are no signs directing toward the carved stairs to the highest point on Thuy Son. It took a lot of wandering and climbing to dead ends before I got to the peak. At around midday the peak was a bad place to be. The sun burned out all the moisture in my body like a microwave, but I lingered to take some photos and enjoy the solitude as Da Nang shimmered against the mountains 30km in the distance. 

Most of my free time in Da Nang was spent eating and I'm OK with that. The same was also more or less true of Hong Kong. I did get to see some cool stuff though. I'd love to go back and see more of Vietnam.

Vietnam (ii): Dining Da Nang

I've been a little slow with posting my photos from Vietnam and I'm actually going to be traveling again in a week (back to Timor-Leste), so there's a good chance I might not get to it all until December. I did, however, write a story for Serious Eats about touring Da Nang's street food with an awesome local food writer that I met doing my pre-research. Summer is a food blogger/hostel owner/tour guide and she took me around to eat a lot of amazing food. I've included all of the photos from the SE story here (including some extras), but click over to SE to read the whole thing.

Vietnam (i): Down and Out in Da Nang

I recently spent a couple of weeks in Danang, Vietnam for work, followed by a few days of leisure in Hong Kong. Danang is toward the middle of the country and occupies sort of what I imagine to be the middle of the spectrum of Asian development-with cities like Dili and Tokyo occupying extreme ends on either side the scale. There's a pronounced juxtaposition of conspicuous wealth and the grime of the over-population of rural-urban migration. A handful of isolated highrises splattered with neon punctuate the skyline on either side of the Han River-a facade to an interior of gritty, dense networks of backstreets, corner shops, and swarms of motorbikes and scooters of biblical proportions. I spent most of my evenings just walking those streets looking for good food, which was amazing and crazy cheap (more on that to come). Below is a handful of shots from the streets of Danang, but stay tuned for some more of my cultural annotations and a lot of food porn.

Oh, and the humidity... Oh god, the humidity...