Yesterday was the day to explore the premier attraction of this area of Vietnam, namely Hoi An. Danang is an afterthought to some degree. Case in point, my parents didn't remember Danang, but when I said I'm visiting Hoi An, it immediately clicked into focus. That all said, Danang does have a few hidden gems inside its glistening city. I already covered a couple of them during the half day we spent at the beach and peninsula, and I should note Danang seems like a lovely place to live / just laze around. And fine, even if there aren't top flight sites, it's still quite good.
We started the day next door to the hotel, at the Danang Museum, which was renovated a couple years back and there seems to be a clear split in google reviews of the place before and after, with the after being a decent improvement. The main piece seems to be upgrading the building, and there now being AC. Truthfully, the building is lovely, a modern metal box blending beautifully with an old colonial building. The museum is mostly on one floor, which tells you in painstaking, insightful and loving detail the story of Danang, from its early people's, to the French colonial period, to of course the war, where being in the middle of the country, Danang was at first a US stronghold that got slowly beaten down. There are even some War Remnants like exhibits at the end. Already doing the mental gymnastics if this then absolves me of my usual trip out of pennance in HCMC. Overall, the Danang Museum is quite nice and a good way to spend an hour away from the heat.
As was our lunch at Kenta, which is a lovely little restaurant deep in the heart of the tourism/expat/hostel neighborhood of An Thuong, which is the area where for instance Saga is housed, but during the day it also has a ton of restaurants. Sadly, many of these are more Western cuisine - yoiu walk these blocks and its literally ~50% white folk. But nestled within all this is Kenta, which while the patrons were still majority foreigner, the menu is authentic Vietnamese classics. Their specialty is Bun Bo, the slightly sharper, spicier cousin to Pho. It was so good, the broth so clear, the meat so perfectly poached. We also split a few other dishes, the best of which being a make it yourself rice paper wrap dish with beautifully smoky pork balls. Kenta was a wondserful lunch. Having spent time in Thailand away from Bangkok got me to re-love Thai food, but I don't know if three days in Vietnam have made me go back to thinking that this is my favorite cuisine.
Our post lunch activity was firmly not spending time indoors, actually quite the opposite. In the Souther part of Danang city proper rests the Marble Mountains, a series of five contained peaks that house many treasures. The main of which is the "water" mountain, and has an incredible combination of temples, pagodas and caves - man made caves for the most part, but ones with intricate carvings, haunting cavernous ceilings, and much more. You can walk up, or you can, like most sentient people, take an elevator. But before that is a cave that is more at ground level - granted this also required going up and down a lot of stairs. Even once you reach the top by elevator, there's a lot of stairs. There's also wood carvaed benches everywhere - the Vietnamese know how ridiculous an ask this is. I sweat a lot, but for one of the few times on my trip here, I saw pretty much everyone similarly challenged.
It's worth it though, with the caves, the viewpoints and pagodas all just lovely, all blending and balancing perfectly with the mountainside forest. The best are probably the caves though, which are so well adorned, haunting (yeah, I overuse taht adjective) and thoughtful. They also all feature some natural element - say one with a waterfall or two with openings at the very end upwards to the sky. The temples too are quite nice, including the other Chua Linh Ung (same name as the one on Son Tha Peninsula). On the whole, the Marble Mountains is quite a nice, if tiring, site.
We were pretty beat at that point, and I had fully sweated through everything, so we did a quick earlier-than-nromal R&R at the hotel, before heading back out for a stroll along the Han River. Tnere are quite a few bridges in Danang crossing the Han, but the two most impressive ones are abouta 15 min walk apart, with the first of them being right outside our hotel. Down the riverfront is the Dragon Bridge, so named due to the large Dragon structure on each side. Both these bridges light up and are more beautiful at dusk/night, but even in the day, they are quite impressive.
Our intended end point was right after the Dragon Bridge, with a stop at the Museum of Cham Sculpture, which is a fairly moderately sized museum that features, well, sculpture from the Cham era (aroudn 1000 - 1300). That's it, that's the deal. It's in the name. What's nice though is that Cham sculpture is quite impressive, from large statues, to freizes, to various depictions of Hindu gods. The Cham people would get more play tomorrow when we visit the My Son Temples Ruins complex 90 minutes outside Danang, but this aws a nice preview. I love museums like this - not too big, super focused on topic, but take that topic to every extent.
That was our last stop of tourism, and on the whole Danang city proper has a fiar day-and-a-half worth of things to see. If you add in food and nightlife, it has more than that though. We went to a different Bia Ha location for a few brews, did our second R&R stint (seriously, the humidity here makes it far worse than Chiang Mai was) and then headed to dinner at Nen, the Michelin rated tasting menu spot in Danang - one of two tasting menu spots, but this being the one that serves Vietnamese food (the other is French). I'll recap it later when I cover each of the tasting menus (gotta do something on that 19-hour flight back home), but all I can say is Nen was perfect, it was brilliant. The care, the story, the exactness of the ingredients, the surprise of each dish. Maybe it's because my expectatiosn were, for whatever reason, slightly reduced, that it was one of my favorite meals in a while.
Post dinner was quite nice, if repeating some of the earlier activities, from Black Wolf for cocktails and then Saga to end it. Black Wolf was shockingly empty - I do worry when I visit these places that are fairly empty how they stay in business. Granted, this is not the heavy tourism season, and it was a Thursday, but a bit worrying nonetheless. More busy was Saga, and it was a great time closing the night, other than of course our customary Pho. For that bt, I'm already excited to share with my friends the brilliance that is Pho Qyunh tomorrow night in HCMC, but Danang is pretty good on the late night / 3AM Pho as well.
