Places to visit in central Vietnam include beach town of Da Nang for Ba Na hills, Marble mountains, Lady Buddha and Hoi An for lantern town
Ba Na Hills
Houses Sunworld Amusement park with the largest cable car ride lasting 17 minutes on one of the routes. It is 45 kms and an hour away from Da Nang city. The entry tickets at $33 were expensive. The cable car itself was worth the price as there was not much to do for our interest once we went up there. You can see changing seasons on the cable car ride from sunny to cloudy to rainy as you reach the top. You are immersed in clouds from midway giving a surreal experience!
Most tourists go to visit the Golden bridge first from Hoi An Station making that route quite crowded. You can take the cable car to top most station from Champa- Suoi Mo first to Indochine station and then make your way down walking which is less tiring. You can take another cable car from Louvre station to Bordeaux, see the Golden bridge, La Jardin gardens, Linh Ung Pagoda and make way further down from Marseille station to Hoi An station
Carry ponchos/ umbrellas as it rains most of the time on the top
Marble Mountains
It is 45 mins away from Bana Hills and 20 mins from Da Nang. There are many caves here with statues of Buddha inside. Moderate fitness required to climb inside the caves.
Take the elevator up to give some head-start on climbing near gate number 2 (number 12 in the map). Huyen Khong is the largest cave- do not miss it!
Lady Buddha on the peninsula
The white statue is visible from miles away and is an icon of Da Nang. You can take a Grab to reach here. Lady Buddha is worshipped by fisherfolk community. There are multiple statues and buildings with idols inside the complex. You an get a full city view from the top with boats on the shore.
Dragon Bridge
We had to call this out separately given the fire and water show on weekends Fri-Sun from 9 PM for 10-15 minutes. It was a very good experience to see the bridge get life
Hoi An
A cute little town on sea side 30 km from Da Nang. The town is a UNESCO World Heritage site for maintaining its ancient architecture. The city ticket gives access to some of the old homes and assembly halls in case you are really interested in experiencing the architecture. The Japanese covered bridge was open without the need for tickets at night
The town transforms at night with colorful lanterns in all shops, boats and on water in the river. You take a lantern boat ride on the river and release some paper lanterns on water
We missed the colorful coconut boat ride since it was dark and rainy. It is recommended to buy tickets ($5) online which saves time haggling on spot. The online tickets do not include spinning of boats and you might be asked for separate tip for that
There are plenty of Indian restaurants in the area and we made an exception and eat out at Rasoi, a pure veg restaurant. Prices were comparable to other Indian restaurants, but on higher side vs. Other cuisines, fairly so. The quality was really good- less oil, medium spicy, almost like home made food. There was no option to take a Thali unlike some of the other Indian places, which can help reduce some cost
Hue
One of the lesser visited destinations with a large citadel and imperial tombs. It was pretty nice to see the scale of buildings here, not possible to capture in pictures. The entrance fees were pretty high for us compared to Vietnam standards. The citadel and 2 tombs combined entry fee costed 420k VND each ($16). Buy combined tickets in case you wish to visit 2-3 tombs
The citadel was gigantic in area with many layers and halls inside. The architecture was average, nothing out of the world, but the size itself was worth it
Ming Mang, Tu Duc and Khai Dinh are the three most visited tombs in the region along with Thien Mu pagoda. The tomb of Khai Dinh is the grandest and best of all with a lot of ceramic work.
Ming Mang tomb was similar to layers at the citadel. We couldn’t visit Tu Duc’s tomb- it is somewhere in the middle compared to Ming Mang and Khai Dinh’s tomb with some bit of ceramic work. The tombs reflect personalities of each of the emperors.
We gave up after walking three fourths of the layers at Ming Mang’s tomb since they looked similar and the path seemed never ending, but later realized that his body is beyond a door on the last layer. The atmosphere was very peaceful, beside the lake
We skipped Thien Mu pagoda as we saw it from outside and it felt like any other pagoda in Vietnam. We were also short of time
We made a mistake of not hiring a taxi a day before travel and relying on Grab rental. It turns out none of the drivers wanted to travel long distances on rentals. All of them insisted on adding one way Grab fares point to point and asking for 3-3.5 Mn VND for the day ($120-140). They don’t refuse while booking or even when you enter the car, all conversations started only after loading our bags into the car. The rate stickers mentioned on cars is pretty useless too (6-8k VND per km depending on the car). Communication was also difficult since none know English. We had to get out and request our hotel to separately arrange for a car and reasonably decent English speaking driver. Full day cost with drop off at Hoi An costed 2.8 Mn VND ($110). Henry, our driver was quite professional and excellent in his services. You can reach him on +84 90165 2168
