If you are Vietnamese please don't think that I am bagging on your country in this entry. That isn't the case at all. I am very fortunate to have gotten into the country when I did because if I had waited just a teensy bit longer I would not have been allowed to come in even until now. I moved here from Thailand and February and for the most part things have been good, but just like anywhere there are going to be some downsides - and some of these things are actually my own fault especially the first one.
There are way too many people in this city
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Any time you go to do almost anything there are going to be a ton of other people there. This is true despite the fact that tourism is almost completely dead in this city. I have never been witness to how crowded everywhere could be if tourism was actually happening and honestly, I am not looking forward to that.
There are more than a million people here and the area itself is quite compact. This leads to travel going almost anywhere being a bit of a traffic nightmare. Therefore, I rarely leave this particular area that I live in.
The beach really isn't that great
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Well that picture looks amazing and I should just shut up because what the hell man? Too bad that is a professional photographer's photoshopped picture that is an advertisement from a hotel website. I can assure you, that is not what it looks like here. I question if that picture is even Da Nang even though where I got the image from claims that it is.
The water here for the most part is grey and actually kind of dirty looking to the point where I hesitate to really get in it at all. Which brings about another aspect of the beach that I don't like. You aren't allowed to go swimming anywhere on the main beach other than pre-approved lifeguard roped in areas. Therefore if you do go swimming you are going to bumping shoulders with strangers if it is at all crowded. I've seen it very crowded down there and this was an immediate "nope" from me.
Surf? What surf?
One of the things that is advertised pretty heavily here is the fact that this is a surfing beach but I don't see how anyone can really justify this statement. I'll admit that I am not the best surfer but I do know a bit. Mostly the only waves we even get here are shorebreak (the waves that break on the sand) and you aren't supposed to surf those anyway unless you enjoy breaking your neck and the board you are on also.
Maybe there is a certain season that I don't know about but thus far I haven't seen anything that I would consider a surfing beach anywhere around here. It certainly isn't in Da Nang city.
Dude, the littering
I remember seeing a statistic about how Vietnam does a little less than awesome when it comes to pollution and you don't really have to look very far to see that this notion is justified even on a local level. There is garbage just discarded EVERYWHERE. When I take my dog for a walk I don't bring a plastic poopie bag with me because I know that i'm only gonna have to take about 4 steps away from the entrance of my condo before I find one lying on the sidewalk.
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I don't know what the mindset is of a person that thinks it is just ok to throw stuff wherever or even worse to just dump a bunch of crap on the ground at a park, which is what the scene above is even though I did not take the photo. I'll maybe focus on that one of these days.
The parks and public squares are very nicely maintained but this is only because of the army of people that are cleaning it up on a daily basis. I'm not big on police presences but I honestly wouldn't mind if there was some sort of enforcement against people littering. It's just trash trash everywhere no matter where you go in this town.
So it probably seems like I am venting / whinging a bit and yeah, that is exactly what I am doing.
There are other downsides that I could include such as the lack of nature and the construction noise that is never-ending, but I suppose I've done enough complaining.
Nowhere is perfect and this place has a lot of upsides, the main ones being that visa policy is very attractive and easy/cheap, the authorities kind of leave you alone all the time (LOVE that aspect of it here), and this is by far the least expensive place that I have ever lived in that I can easily do so for under $1000 a month while eating nearly every meal at a restaurant.
Being "left alone" by Government entities, is a BIG PLUS, in my book😎
tell me about it. Combine that with the fact that beer is less than $1 at most bars and I have all the reason I need to continue living here
At that price, you can afford to bathe in it...😎
That is too bad that they don't take care of things over there like you would expect. Especially if they are so heavy on tourism. You would think they want things looking at nice as possible. Are there smaller towns you could live in that might not have the same issues? I am guessing some of the smaller towns or villages are actually pretty remote. I would also assume Saigon (Did they rename it?) is probably ten times worse than DaNang. Hanoi? Nah Bhea? Are those still places?
Saigon was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City but a lot of people still refer to it as Saigon. The names are pretty interchangeable but HCMC is the official name. There are smaller towns and I will likely check them out in the not too distant future. Don't get me wrong, I still really like it here I think the population density is just a bit too much for my liking. Where I last lived we had a similar population number but it was over a much larger expanse of land. Here is just so crowded everywhere you go.
Yeah, it sounds pretty tight. It is great to hear how much the country has grown over the past couple of decades.
Littering is a shame unfortunately. You should start a trend collecting garbage then locals will follow your example. Vietnamese might even write an article about you. In my area, an elderly but diligent garbage collector was featured on the news. By the way, I always pick up my dog's doo doo.
In Sweden they have bottle banks for plastic where you can earn some cash back from each bottle recycled, a great incentive for people not to litter. Growing up in the 80's 90's if you dropped litter you were called all sorts of names making you feel like an idiot for doing so. Good snippet reading of true life facts!
Yeah I'm pretty sure that littering is frowned upon here as well but people still do it. The thing that gets me is that there are plenty of garbage cans all over the place so when someone decides to just throw something on the ground instead they have reached a pinnacle of laziness.
Thankfully almost anything that can be recycled is. Plastic bags and those awful polystyrene containers aren't though and this constitutes a great amount of the litter waste.