The train from Hue to Vietnam was great, the last section of it carving it’s way along the lush hillsides overlooking the coast heading into Danang. I made sure to get a left hand window seat just for these views. Although it was raining the entire time, and the bright shades of capri blue and aquamarine that you’d see in photos looked more like a dark shade of gray blue. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the weather, but this rain was the start of the summer season’s first tropical depression in Central Vietnam. Yay. I run bad in Danang, when I first flew out to Asia in December I flew into Danang (great airport btw) and it literally rained the entire week I was there. De ja vu.
The reason I like to stop in Danang, besides the beaches, food, coffee, prices, etc, is that it has poker, albeit quasi-legal poker. Cash games (but not tournaments) are illegal in Vietnam, but there are casinos that are allowed to operate as long as they don’t allow any Vietnamese citizens, and some of them have live poker, such as the Crown Casino in Danang. It’s also in USD, which is very convenient. For fully legal rooms there are a bunch of card rooms around the city that run tournaments only, and this is where you’ll find all the Vietnamese players. Although I don’t particularly like tournament poker, and the buy ins are small. But still they’re a good way to kill a rainy afternoon, and the tournaments are very, very soft. Plus it’s nice to play with and chat with locals. In Cambodia, there are very few locals who play poker. Technically it’s illegal for them to gamble in casinos, but it’s not enforced at all. But the few that play are usually either short buying at the lowest stakes, or playing high stakes, which sums up Cambodian society pretty well. No middle class.
Where I end up every night in Danang
Danang is a pretty interesting city. It’s been growing very rapidly! It seems to pick up 3% every year, so it’s doubled in size in the last 20 years, up to 1.2 million people. High rises and ones under construction are literally everywhere. It’s long been the cheap beach hotspot for Koreans, with whole sections of the town filled with Kbbqs and karaoke joints. Since Covid it’s been picking up steam as a digital nomad hotspot, with youtubers touting the cheap prices and apartment leases for around $300/month. Although if prices (and crowds) this summer were any indication, Danang’s status of Hidden Gem is officially over! Tourism is up something like 35% from last year. A big part of that has been Vietnam’s push to tap into the Indian market, and holy cow, you can really tell. Vietnam is certainly the hotspot for Indians at the moment.
Hotel prices were at least double what they were in December, so I ended up getting an Airbnb on a nice quiet leafy street that doesn’t have any high rises, which I had already scouted out last time I was here. Being next to the sounds of pounding and jackhammers all day, every day, is a constant worry when selecting a place to stay in Danang. This Airbnb was run by a friendly young Vietnamese woman, although it’s a bit of an awkward set up, as you walk through the living room and kitchen to get to the staircase going up, but she didn’t seem to mind and liked to chat with all her guests. My room had full length glass doors overlooking the street, which was nice. I liked this particular street because there’s very little traffic, there’s lots of trees, but also because I like how it has lots of local shops that operate on the ground floors of the buildings.
In Vietnam it’s very common to turn the ground floor of the place you own into any sort of business of your choosing. There’s no real restrictions or rules against it. So on this street there was a nail salon, laundry, and foot massage shop all run as small businesses. And then for food you’ve got a fresh juice and smoothie place, a coffee/pastry shop, a fruit/yogurt/granola bowl shop, an ice cream place, and a sandwich spot. Most of them are set up as professional looking establishments (albeit with very little seating) but for instance the ice cream and sandwich spots are literally just people’s homes and you basically walk into their living room to place your order and sit at a table on the sidewalk. And that’s if there’s someone even there. If they’re not, you just move along. In a very corporate world, I like this kind of thing. Of course I wouldn’t like it if I really really wanted that chicken bacon sandwich.
So for the first three days it did nothing but rain. Rain rain rain. Enough to flood most of the streets under a few inches of water. In a tourist beach city like Danang, there really isn’t a whole lot to do if the weather is shit. Sit in coffee shops and get massages. Definitely no shortage of either of those type of places. The number of coffee shops in town is actually insane. Take your pick from trendy, modern and minimalist, to old school communist kitsch, or perhaps no decorations at all, just little stools and tables set outside. You could café hop for months and just scratch the surface. Since I was staying in the digital nomad part of town, the nice indoor places were always full of people sitting on their laptops, taking up space. A million coffeeshops, somehow all of them busy. Wild.
After a few days the weather cleared up and it was 80’s and sunny the rest of time. Excellent beach weather. And of course the beaches aren’t crowded during the middle of the day because Asians are absolutely allergic to the sun. You should see what the Vietnamese women wear riding their motos around town to make sure no glint of sunlight touches any piece of bare skin. Oversize sunglasses, hats, full face scarf, pants, long sleeves, gloves, etc. Dressed like it’s winter in 90 degree weather. It isn’t until right around sunset when all the Asians hit he beach. This is when you realize how popular Danang is right now, because the beaches are jammed.
Besides the beaches, which aren’t anything amazing, Danang has lots of interesting places within scootering distance. Danang is on a peninsula that juts out into the ocean, and at the tip of the peninsula is a mostly (and surprisingly) undeveloped, hilly forested area with small paved roads you can take your scooter on. What I didn’t know was that they won’t let you take an automatic scooter up there, so I had to turn around. Bummer!
The most popular spot around is definitely Hoi An, about 30 minutes south, which is a kind of bougie ancient town, filled with boutique shops and cafes and famous for it’s brightly lit paper lanterns everywhere as well as boat trips down the river. I liked eating in the big indoor market, which is full of small vendors with rectangular bar type seating all vying to get you to their stand. Hoi An’s specialty is called Cao Lau, a pork noodle soup dish with distinctive chewy noodles. Very tasty.
As for the main streets of Hoi An, it is an absolute zoo. Tourism has basically exploded there. Although June is peak domestic travel time for the Vietnamese and it’s also peak Indian holiday travel as well, so yeah, it’s a busy month. It’s still worth checking out, and who doesn’t love a bunch of cutesy cafes, restaurants and cocktail bars in old French buildings with old timey paper lanterns illuminating everything? Women especially seem to dig it. But really there’s no room to even walk and I had to chuckle at just how many boats were in the river, all jammed in there like sardines. No thanks. A few hours in Hoi An was enough for me.
There’s also the Marble Mountain, which has a bunch of Buddhist temples built into the karst mountain grottos. And then there’s the Hai Van Pass, a fun 20km mountain road with sweeping views of the ocean (basically the same route as the train). There’s some sort of resort amusement park called Bana Hills, which I would not be attending. Plus there’s lots of nice rural scenery, rice fields and the like which makes for a nice day riding on a moto. You can basically pick any direction and it’s nice for riding.
So I spent a few straight days picking a new place to drive around in the day and then playing poker at night. Unfortunately the cash games were pretty dead and it was mostly the house players keeping the games going. I really wish Danang had better poker, because it really is a great spot to hang out for a while if you like beach life and doing outdoor activities and meeting other nomads. Here’s the shots from going over the Hai Van Pass and then driving around the Lap An Lagoon. The lagoons are an underrated part of the country imo. And getting fresh oysters straight from the source is always nice.
It reminded me of Playa del Carmen. The city itself being nothing special, kinda ugly, culturally uninteresting, full of transplants, but as a foreigner there is just a lot of stuff going on. You can easily join yoga groups, running clubs, do beach volleyball, surfing, Crossfit, trivia nights etc. Less focus on a drinking and partying. Which is kind of the opposite of Phnom Penh, where the crowd leans more boozy and degenerate. I mean I like Phnom Penh and all, its cushy, some excellent restaurants and bars, but there is basically zero nature, no outdoorsy activities at all. Not even parks. My outdoorsy activity is going for runs that mostly involve dodging moving cars, trucks and scooters and broken pieces of sidewalk or pavement. Even getting out and doing day trips there’s very little of interest, mostly just endless sprawl followed by flat scrubby land. Aghghh. Not the best! Of course the 2nd best poker scene in Southeast Asia is Manila, which is an even worse city! So after being in Danang I wasn’t overly excited to return to Phnom Penh. Although I still had a few days in Ho Chi Minh City first.