After our wonderful experience with sustainability in Australia, coming to Vietnam has been a jump in the opposite direction. There’s no recycling here. No apparent sustainability efforts. At stores you get plastic wrapped boxes of individually plastic wrapped perishables and plastic bags for every little thing you buy. It’s nearly impossible to shop here without buying single-use plastics.
There is a lot of farming, even in the city and we’ve seen several nurseries selling trees and plants. We’ve discovered large markets where (mostly) fresh produce is sold.
But walking around you’ll see there is garbage and there are rats. Piles of construction debris block sidewalks and the beach is filled with cigarette butts.
I’m reluctant to speak to traffic because I don’t know if what we’ve witnessed is normal considering the COVID outbreak. But it seems like the primary source of transportation are scooters which I imagine use less gas and produce lower emissions.
Those are my observations about eco/sustainability.
After my previous entry, our experiences have really fallen off. Shortly after our tour, we were told that if we wanted to stay in this apartment, we needed to renew soon, because if our reservation lapsed, they couldn’t allow us to stay here. And no new reservations could be made in town. Two days later, all the restaurants closed then they shut down Grab (Asia Uber). And several days after that, food delivery was stopped. The only places available to us were the convenience stores and the department store.
Vietnam only offers a 30-day tourist visa. We’d still hoped to make it to Osaka, Japan on April 7th, but those flights were cancelled. Then we booked Chiang Mai, Thailand, but those flights were cancelled. Even if we had travelled there, there was no certainty that they’d allow us to stay. So, we found a Visa surrogate; someone who could get an official Visa extension through the closed down government office. The alternative was to stay illegally, face $125/day in fees, possible jail time and be blacklisted. This cost us $300 and allows us to stay until June 13th. We’re praying that we can get to Tbilisi, Georgia by May 7th, but there has been no indication about a timeline for travel restrictions.
The beach here has been caution-taped off and the lifeguards and police are shooing people away. Evalynn and I have visited a couple times sitting on the steps of the vacant hotels across the street. There’s not a lot of space to walk in our tiny studio apartment, so any chance we have to go for a walk, we like to take. The sidewalks here are practically empty. Nobody walks places except tourists, and they all stay down by the beach.
I’ve been reading a lot and cooking. I’ve been waking up and trying to catch the weekly Umphrey’s McGee and Phish Dinner and a Movie web casts and whatever else catches my eye on Jambase’s Livestreams calandar. We’re mostly staying in these days. In that regard, it’s not much different from being anywhere else. But we’re still pretty happy to be in Da Nang and ready to get back on the road.