As we learned in the past few days, it’s always best when traveling through Vietnam to leave early in the morning. So that’s exactly what we ignored this morning. We woke up at around 6:30 and hung around the hotel until nearly 10. Perfect timing if you like to sweat a lot…
We left the hotel, took our bikes and left the city towards the Son Tra Mountain, also know as Monkey Mountain. It was a beautiful climb towards the top, sometimes overlooking the city but most of the time with a beautiful view over the sea. On our way up we skipped the temple and some of the nicer spots planning to do them on the way down instead.
The last part of the mountain road was a narrow concrete path through some woods. It was just wide enough to have a motorcycle and a car pass. Luckily, there was only like one or two cars up here and the other traffic was also on the low side. We passed a Russian guy on a rental scooter who we would meet again on the top. His scooter was barely functional, had very bad tires, a break which didn’t work too well and no excess power at all.
Top top presented itself with a beautiful view of the Da Nang city skyline. We spent a few minutes up there, taking a few pictures.
Afterwards we drove back down. The descent was so steep the engine break wasn’t enough in first gear at certain points. I have no idea how / if the Russian guy actually made it back down. I have some serious doubts…
While going down the mountain we realized what idiots we have been. We left way too late and should have applied the SPF 50 sun screen instead of the 30. It seemed like we’d both get a slight sun burn today. It turns out, it would actually be a pretty bad one. Not English tourist bad, but still worse than expected. On the way down we stopped at a road-side restaurant to have lunch. After having some real language difficulties (actually worse than in the country side) we finally got our hot pot with fish.
Two days ago we booked a street food tour through Da Nang. Since it started at 17:00 we took a nap at the air conditioned hotel room where we noticed that we both got a not-so-nice red skin color. Great. The next two days are going to be perfect.
We started the tour by going to a place which was actually closed today. After this we continued on to eat some Banh Mi, a lot of small dishes which were mostly new to us. We continued on with some coffee (which wasn’t that great to be honest) and then some Vietnamese BBQ. We finished the evening with a absolutely great dessert: An avocado with a coconut ice cream and topped with some caramelized coconut flakes. After smashing it all with the spoon it was a very rich and creamy experience which was like nothing I’ve ever had before. The guide was a local who spoke very good English. All in all, it was a great experience.
We finished the evening by going to a bar called “On The Radio” which offered overpriced beer together with tinnitus-inducing music. We left after one beer each.
