Da Nang
It was more than 55 years ago when I last visited Da Nang, Vietnam. It had been a stop-over place as I traveled from Phu Cat where I was stationed, to an air base in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, where I would be working for the next 30 days. They called it TDY to NKP. During that time, Da Nang was another major air base in Vietnam where troops, ammunition, supplies and evacuations occurred routinely.
I had never been to any downtown Vietnam city, with the exception of Saigon. From what I had heard, Da Nang was a beautiful city.
Our tour that Debby created with Viator took us into the city of HUE. It, too, was a beautiful city. The Barrio’s were much the same as the other two stops we had made during the past 3 days. The littler shops and storefronts looked much the same. The main difference I noticed was the absence of the thick, white smog. I could actually see several blocks away instead of just two!
Like other places, HUE was getting ready for the Chinese New Year. There were lots of flowers on the streets with markets open for business to furnish flowers for customers. We visited more monuments, Pagados and Temples. Our Guide was a young Vietnamese woman who taught school as her primary job. Her name was Loi. She was very knowledgeable and fed us more information than we could retain.
We visited the tomb of someone very important and the temple of Vietnam’s last king prior to their being taken over in 1945. From then on, they had a few wars as the North Vietnamese Communists were trying to take over South Vietnam. They would eventually succeed. The French had been involved with Vietnam since the 1800’s. In fact, the French fought in Vietnam for more than 20 years before the Americans came in to show the French how to do it. After 20 years, we, too, pulled out. That’s when the Communist swarm came in and invaded South Vietnam like locusts. We were told first hand how they would break into someone’s home, take everything, plunder people and valuables, imprison or kill families or just throw them out into the streets like garbage. It was a bad time. Now, 50 years later, here we are, friends and visitors like nothing happened. They want to be like us, learn our language, watch our movies, listen to our music and be like us. Times change, don’t they?
We visited the Forbidden City, the residential palace of the last king. We walked many steps during our one-day stay. We visited tjhe hilltop memorial of where the king was buried. There were almost 125 steps up the mountainside to get to the memorial. Some of us walked all of them! There were no roads or elevators to help. There never was nor will there ever be.
The ladies wanted to go shopping and so our Guide stopped at a middle end shopping center. We went in and looked around for a while; not much was purchased. The flowers outside were gorgeous!
Lunch was furnished inside a busy restaurant. Apparently, several other tours had the same idea. We ate a myriad of dishes of local Cantonese foods that we could not pronounce. All of it was good. The Jasmine hot tea was very good, as well.
We visited another low-end market where we could buy Vietnamese trinkets and cheap stuff.
At another store, Loi, the Guide took us to a store where we bought a few things. I bought a wooden turtle that was a three dimensional puzzle. I will try to learn how to put it together. It is carved from the Jack Fruit tree. We watched a young woman make insence. It was interesting.
All in all, with all the places we visited and the walking we did, it felt good to get back to our rooms aboard the cruise ship, have dinner in the International Restaurant and crash early. The next day would be a day at sea as we headed for Taiwan.
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