Cam An Beach and Around Danang – January 2023 – Brumblays Abroad

Picture the WorldJanuary 26, 2023

Cam An Beach and Around Danang – January 2023

Our Asiana flight from Seattle left an hour late, which seems to be SOP.

But they kept feeding us – in this case the airplane-food version of bibimbap

When we changed flights in Seoul, the rain and people in puffies had us worried.
We thought we might still be in Seattle.

Come 11:00 pm, we found ourselves doing go-arounds above Danang. The airport was fogged in, something the air crew said they’d never seen. It looked surreal from the air, but then it was 7:00 am in Seattle, and lack of sleep may have been a factor.

The next morning we woke to a beautiful day on the beach.

The Boutique Hoi A Resort is a well-conceived property with about 110 rooms spread between low-rise buildings and little beach villas. We’re in the room seen on the far left. Originally booked for 16 days, we liked it so much we moved some things around to stay for 3½ weeks.

Just off the hotel lawn, coracles sit on the beach, waiting for fishermen to waddle them down to the water and scull out to lay their nets.

A coracle is propelled by standing at the front and waggling one’s oar back and forth. The wind and tide, however, have much to say about how fast you get anywhere.

When a coracle comes ashore with fish, people materialize from nowhere and run to buy their share of the catch. A dozen of the boney little fish sell for about $1. They’re used for soups and the like, which with noodles make up a good portion of the local diet.

There are two ways to move a coracle across the beach. One requires four men and two poles to carry it over the sand, the other requires one man and a lot of time, first lifting one side, spinning it, then switching sides to do it again. Any other combination is a problem for unwary tourists, who fishermen take great pleasure in co-opting. I need to learn how to say “bad back” in Vietnamese. But then the photographer and I were running on the beach when these two spotted me.

January usually heralds the end of the Vietnam coast’s rainy season, but it can be fickle. And this January has been more fickle than not, with sunny and cloudy days taking uneven turns with rainy, even stormy ones.

Some days the sea is placid, on others it’s a washing machine.

Dry days we spend lounging on the beach, with carrot or watermelon juice …

Or if it’s windy, we hang out by the pool. The photographer took this shot on her way back from yet another appointment at the spa. A trip she’s been making more often.

Cam An Beach lies between the more famous An Bang Beach and Cua Dai Beach. Don’t ask me how to tell where one ends and the next begins. That line in the sand washed away years ago, I think. Nevertheless, we’d often walk the mile or so of sand into An Bang town …

… where we’d buy $5 knock-off fitness stuff, hit up the ATM …

… and eat lunch overlooking beach chairs awaiting the tourists who bike or taxi in from the many small inland hotels.

The long beach is far from pristine, though. Rising sea levels have taken their toll. Here is what’s left of a restaurant we ate at last trip. It was set well back from the water then.

Others still survive, but not without the expenditure of bamboo.

Stretches of beach have accumulated abandoned building projects. We see many such skeletons, both along the shore and inland. We wonder if any will be restarted.

Here is where we stayed in a cottage 3½ years ago. The long slope of ironwood trees and sand with umbrellas and lounge chairs is gone. The owners are trying to keep the property in the family through the novel use of concrete culvert pipes and sand.

One really rainy day, we got a car and driver and headed into Danang. Most vehicles on the road are motorbikes, rain or shine.

We always try to make a point of visiting local shopping centers and markets, for the window they open onto everyday life
(above and below).

One sunny day, we took off through Danang and then west for Ba Na Hills, about an hour drive from our spot on the beach.

At the bottom of the hills is mostly parking lot and grand entrance …

… and where you catch the four-mile cable car to the top.

En route, the cable runs go over peaks and into valleys. It’s a long trip over dense jungle.
Barf bags are thoughtfully included.

At the end of the line, atop a 5,000 foot peak, sits a Vietnamese amusement park. The core section is patterned after a medieval French village, but it’s expanding.

While we were there, the fog started rolling in. Just clouds, really. So we ate lunch. Of the 30 restaurants throughout the park, we ate at what (I hope) is the worst. The Beer Plaza, set up as a huge faux German beer hall under a mirrored gold dome, serves a god-awful Asian-international buffet. We made the mistake of buying the lift ticket that included it.

The iconic long walkway held aloft by massive concrete hands looking out over hills and plains … well … didn’t. We took pictures anyway.

Besides, there were lots of other things for us to look at besides the view, like this proboscoid moai with the Don King haircut.

When we finally headed back down, we took a different cableway. Gliding off into the eerie-cool cloud and fog.

The first half of our stay coincided with Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar new year. Tet kumquat trees were as ubiquitous as Christmas trees in the US.

Happy Buddha offerings crop up everywhere. Half food and incense and half cigarettes and alcohol, they seem to be as much to keep the ancestors happy as to propitiate the gods.

The hotel would put up offering tables at different places and at different times. They’d only be up for an hour or so, spirits in general being quick consumers, I suppose.

Morning walks and runs on the beach, through air thick enough you lean into it, are peaceful. The scent of wood fires and incense mingle with salt and sea spray.