Danang and Central Vietnam - Tuesday

The meat of our trip was to be exploring Central Vietnam. This included the Citadel city of Hue (Full Metal Jacket) and Hoi An (Down the coast near China Beach). We were going to tour these very historic cities and then hit the old war DMZ. Things change when you travel when typhoons enter the picture.

With it all under water around here, there is no touring and Danang has thousands of Western visitors looking for a way out, either through HMC (Ho Chi Minh City) or Hanoi. Hotels are tough to come by and the flight system here is a joke. Getting what should be a 2 minute transaction took over an hour and we still did not have confidence that we had an economy seat heading south. We decided walking to the airlines HQ and confirming would be a good use of time while walking the mean streets of Danang. There were some long faces and sad stories today at the airport.

Danang during the day is a different place than viewing at night. When it is buttoned up at night, it looks like the Lower East side of Manhattan without the crime. We have done a lot of walking all over many neighborhoods today and never felt threatened. Pretty interesting. I am not sure if it is because the prospect of the consequence of messing with a tourist is so distasteful or just not part of their culture. They are a very nice people.

We will get up at 6AM and head to the airport to Saigon. We spent part of this afternoon logging onto Expedia and securing decent hotels for the rest of the trip. We had Friday forward locked down but had to work to set up the next 2 nights.

Anticipated sites and tours will be the Vietcong tunnels north of the city, the beaches and the Mekong delta. This is Swift Boat country that most will remember from the movie Apocalypse Now and John Kerry's questionable tour of duty.

I am sorry to have missed all that the Central would have offered. We are restructuring the trip to be a great general survey of the South. Leaves more for the next trip.

I will post later tomorrow to recap more of the other events and backfill.