Vietnam Day 1 - Danang

Woohoo! After weeks and weeks of planning, I was finally on my way to Vietnam!

My travelmate cum soulmate, jm. And, the silly boy who skipped lessons to send us off. As we couldn't get good tickets to go Hanoi (our first choice), we decided to go for the silkair promotion which fly to central vietnam, Danang.

Danang is a city with an international airport. But! it is yet a developed city. When our plane landed, our plane was the ONLY plane in the whole airport. The operations of the airport are still quite primitive too. The Danang people can't really speak English there and it is not tourist friendly at all. Oh, and this is the first city that I visited that doesn't have Mac and 7-11s around! Me and jm were so amazed by this. Almost every vietnamese will own a motorbike and that is their main form of transport. So the whole vietnam is swarming with motorbikes and bicycles. Their traffic is damn messy and it is so difficult to cross their roads.


The hotel that we stayed in Danang, Bamboo Green Harbourside, is very lan. One of our most expensive accommodation but the lousiest.

We reached the hotel at about 4pm and we were told that there was no electricity in the hotel and electricity would only be back at 5.30pm. The staff helped us to lit a candle in the room and we went to the toilet with the help of the candle too. Damn pathetic. We decided to go out and look for dinner. According to our holy bible (aka lonely planet), there's good food at no.9 bach dang street. I am not sure how long did we spend walking up and down their streets looking for no.9 but there's no no.9! gave up! so we just settled for a seemingly decent place to have our dinner. But the boss could not speak english and the menu was in vietnamese. Luckily, there was a customer there who could speak english so she helped by being the translator. Haha.

These were what we got in the end of the chicken-and-duck ordering process. Kangkong, frog's legs (kanna conned, the boss told us chicken initially!) and fish soup. I saw the staff caught the fish from the fish tank. :O Think the dinner cost us about SGD12.

After dinner, we just continued to walk around the streets, there's really nothing much to do at night. Oh, as we were walking along the street, we kind of attracted alot of unwanted attention and got wolf-whistled at. I think danang men never see non-vietnamese women before. -_-"

We spotted this traditional pastries shop and bought some back to the hotel to eat. Nice and cheap :)

Even though the hotel was very lousy, the service was quite commendable. We had to go Hoi An the next day so we asked one of the hotel staff for help. jm always refer this friendly staff who helped us as xiao shuai ge. Haha. He waited for the local bus that could bring us to Hoi An with us. But I think he got too distracted talking to us that we missed the bus! faint. Then he got this crazy idea of asking his colleagues to ride us to Hoi An since they stayed in Hoi An and were on their way back after work. We could have wait another half an hour for the bus but we just said yes. First time in my life that I actually rode on a motorbike. Cool. Even though their english was not very good, they loved talking to us. Throughout the one hour journey, my driver kept teaching me vietnamese. I could not remember anything now except tree is 'gei'. jm's driver is more hiong because he asked for her number and asked her whether she would consider living in vietnam. LOL.

A picture taken with our drivers outside our hotel in Hoi An. One of them is called binh and I can't remember the name of the other one. Oops. Anyway our ride is not for free. We paid them USD 1 each. I think this is quite a hefty sum for lompanging people.

See next post for our stay in Hoi An!