The far north side of the Da Nang beach is undergoing renovation / beautification

I love that I live so close to the beach. I take it for granted often but every now and then I go up to the rooftop of my building and kind of reflect on how fortunate I am to have ended up in such a place.

There is a downside to where I live though and that is that it is extremely popular to the point that there are so many people visiting the beach that I don't really want to go down there and this is why I end up just looking at it from my rooftop instead of actually being there.

When they started cracking down on dogs being allowed on the beach that was kind of the final straw. A beautiful beach with too many people on it is no longer beautiful in my mind and yes I realize that by being here I am also part of the problem.

Anyway, Lately I have been looking at areas that are a bit out of the tourist part of town and noticed that the government has kind of revitalized a part of the beach that doesn't have much in the way of tourism on it, and it is lovely.

A few years back, this part of the beach was completely wiped out by a typhoon. The structural integrity of a lot of the buildings were compromised and the road was completely washed out. The erosion on the sand was really bad as well.

Since that time they have installed some pretty futuristic looking pumps and waterways and they also installed a bunch of coconut or palm trees on the sand and that is why if you look closely you can see that all of those trees have little stands to help them stay upright. I would imagine that in a few years time they will have good enough roots to not need assistance.

For me, one of the best things about this beach is that right now it is mid day, and there is nobody around. This is in stark contrast to the end of the beach that I live at, where there are so many people and now they have rather loud beach bars complete with DJ's (yuck) that kind of ruin the nature and definitely destroy the one thing we have so little of here in Da Nang... silence.

As of yet, there isn't much in the way of hotels up on this end even though the beach is essentially the same. There are less waves on this end, possibly because the peninsula blocks them, but I am not sure about this.

There is one thing about the northern end of the beach that is not good though and I think if the idea here is to turn this into another sort of leisure place that they are going to have to change this.

While this is pretty far to the north; nearly at the end of the road actually, this is the area that apparently is for the parking of fishing boats and that means that this area stinks and the water is somewhat dirty because of oil and various other things that fishing boats leak into the water. I don't know if you are aware of this but Vietnam has an extremely bad reputation for polluting the oceans and the fishing industry is a big part of why that is the case. During certain times of day you can walk down to the water and you can see a sort of rainbow-like reflective sheen on the water that is oil and other chemicals floating around. Basically you wouldn't want to swim in that and neither would anyone else.

This is about 7km from where I currently live and you can see the buildings of the very popular tourist areas in the background of the last picture.

There would be a lot of benefits for me if I were to move all the way down here but not to the boat mooring area, not that far. For one thing, there are virtually no policies down here so that means I would be able to take Nadi out onto the sand any time I feel like it. While there are some people that come to the water here in the morning and evenings (because that is when Vietnamese come to use the water) there are far fewer of them down here and I have never seen any authorities harassing people for this rule and that at this point. There is also a lot less people. Parking is easy and the road leading across doesn't have thousands of cars on it. It is still pretty busy but at this point of the beach there isn't any reason to be down here if you are not local. There are very few hotels and virtually no industry.

The downsides are that there is a lot less shade until those trees grow up a bit and of course the risk of the water being polluted by whatever the fishermen are throwing in the water. I don't normally swim in the sea here anyway so that wouldn't affect me directly. Mostly I just like to let my doggy friend run around and play in the sand.

The problem is going to be finding a sort of place to live that is as nice as the one I currently live in. It is going to be tough or impossible to find a place that has security, a pool, and a gym in this part of town. There just isn't enough demand at the moment for those things to exist. I really prefer swimming in a pool over the ocean, but I do like to have the ocean to look at.

I'll start to investigate around this area soonish. I still like where I live but sometimes the amount of people and annoyances that come along with all those people tends to get under my skin.

In the meantime I am really impressed with the work they have done on the beach and gardens here, especially when you consider that almost nobody uses this part of the beach.

Of course if they do have some plan to expand tourism to this area I already know what that will entail. It will be yet another decade of constant banging and digging and beeping from trucks backing up.