A stone altar in Da Nang and a brick tower at My Son can feel like separate sights until you understand who made them. Both belong to the world of Champa, whose rulers built sanctuaries along the coast of what is now central and southern Vietnam. The Champa Kingdom developed through a changing network of…
I arrived in Da Nang on June 22, after spending several months on Phu Quoc. My VietJet flight was delayed by almost 90 minutes, it was already late in the evening, and I had several suitcases with me. But the moment I left the airport, I could feel the difference. After months of island life,…
My Da Nang motorbike route was not a perfectly optimized sightseeing itinerary. It was 24 hours with a rented Honda ADV 150, one brake mistake, a spectacular mountain road, a sunrise I missed, a Son Tra checkpoint I could not pass, a forgotten power bank and completely wrong shoes for Marble Mountains. And I would…
Da Nang looks unusually planned for a fast-growing Vietnamese coastal city: wide roads, modern bridges, a long beachfront and two sides of the city tied together by the Han River. None of that happened by accident. The city visitors see today was shaped by centuries of maritime trade, the decline of Champa, French colonial rule,…