The desolate and empty streets of Da Nang

Da Nang is a tourist city. One of the most popular tourist cities in all of Vietnam as far as I know and personally, I wish it was a bit less popular because during high season the entire part of the city that I live in is overrun with buses of tourists and beaches so packed that they are not even fun to visit. Of course we also have those horrible paragliding features that destroy the ambiance of every beach around the world as well.

Well right now we have none of that and while at times it is nice to have quieter streets, the streets these days are almost scarily quiet.

Yesterday a friend and I went on a bike ride to just go explore and some of the areas we visited were almost completely devoid of people yet all the shops that cater to tourists were still open but without a single customer in sight.

Normally, these 4 lanes of beach road are very necessary and just like a lot of places in Vietnam, simply crossing the street can be a stressful situation because there isn't any real break in the traffic during the day and the crosswalks are not observed by any of the drivers. Personally I don't think they should even paint them on the streets because it gives tourists a false sense of security because back in their home countries crosswalks or zebra crossings are very much a safe space and if a motorist hits a pedestrian in these zones the driver is going to be in big trouble. Here in Vietnam, you are just a dumbass tourist who wasn't looking out for traffic, the crosswalks are completely meaningless. That's another story though.

The somewhat famous "Marble Mountain" is quite near where my condo, so this wasn't even a very adventurous ride on our part. This place is a tourist trap if there ever was one in this city and in a "normal" year the streets would be lined with buses of people who go up the elevator (there are stairs but very few people use them) have a look around and then are ushered to a gift shop that is selling garbage at inflated prices. You know the type of place, they exist all over the world.

When we went down this normally very busy and crowded street this time, we were the only people on it and I was actually surprised to see that the tourist shops that sell trash knick-knacks were still open despite there being no one around.

I couldn't help but feel as though I was in a post-apocalyptic film of sorts because the absolute quiet, although it was nice, was almost spooky. Anyone that has lived in Vietnam or even visited there for any extended period of time can attest to the fact that this is a very noisy country so the peace and quiet was refreshing but I couldn't help but feel bad for the horrible financial situation that most of these places are probably experiencing right now.

The very first person that smiled at us as we were going down the road (and we had planned this) we went into their shop and bought some piece of crap marble statue that is no doubt mass-produced. I question whether or not it is actually made of marble. In total we spent around $5 and didn't haggle over the price.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if we had been the only customers that this person had seen that day, perhaps even that week because the entire reason that these stores exist at all is the Marble Mountain itself, which is currently roped off to the public.

We were able to sneak into one of the outlying attractions that I don't think is actually a tourist spot anyway and get a few photos of this and other guardians of the, ummm, I think it was a temple. I'm not sure about that though. We did encounter a few people while we were back there as we sat in the shade an had an ice cold beer and they didn't seem at all fussed that we were there. Our masks were off just for the beers but then when we got back on the bike we masked up again even though it does seem a bit silly since we didn't really encounter any other people while we were in the area.

I'm hopeful that things will change here soon, it has now been over 2 weeks that we have been in lockdown and while it hasn't affected my life a great deal, the disastrous consequences that it is having on these small business owners is reaching critical levels of failure, even though they sell what I consider to be tourist garbage.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed that the authorities know what they are doing and that this will all be over soon.