We took a nice ride on our new eBikes yesterday; from Cẩm Thanh to the Cửa Đại lighthouse and then to and through the Cẩm An/An Bàng Beach area.
It was VERY encouraging to see central Cửa Đại Beach looking good again.
However, it's difficult not to be a bit discouraged at the many nearby seaside resorts still vacant/shut and looking shabby.
Of course, the same is true in Dà Nẵng (Holiday Beach Resort being a prime example) & Nha Trang, though not so much in Quy Nhơn, which is not nearly as dependent on foreign tourist traffic as the other places.
I remember the greater Dà Nẵng area from 1972, when there were no "resorts" except perhaps for the R&R Center at Mỹ Khê Beach.
I recall sitting on a hillside--not too far from Bà Nà Hills--and looking out over Sơn Trà peninsula and the East Việt Nam Sea, predicting that in 20 years there would be a Howard Johnson's resort hotel there somewhere.
So when I returned to Dà Nẵng and visited Hội An in 2018, it was somewhat satisfying to see my prediction come true, though I haven't been a big fan of all developments.
It's interesting now to have seen both the rise of seaside resorts and then their decline as a result of storm damage and Covid.
Hopefully there is a good future in store for all involved, but perhaps some seaside resorts should have never been developed at Cửa Đại in the first place.
Left to their own devices, I don't think that Vietnamese people would build there in those ways simply for domestic tourists.
Just a little ways down the coast at Tam Thanh by Tam Kỳ, there's a beautiful shoreline that Vietnamese love to visit and most foreigners don't know about.
Talking with locals there about why the ocean side of that strip of land has not really been developed, they tell you it's because they don't think anybody is crazy enough to want to live there through the winters.
Sure enough, a British friend of mine who has a B&B of sorts on the ocean side there just reported that the extensive and supposedly indestructible seawall/promenade has begun to crumble during the most recent episode of storm surf last week.
The typhoon we survived in Dà Nẵng last September left marks on the seawall there as well, even though the beach width is much greater there.
Meanwhile, it's great to live close enough to the shore to get there in less than 10 minutes, but far enough away that I can avoid the next major storm creaming the area.
Cheers! 😎👍
