Relocation from Da Nang to Dalat, Vietnam

Greetings from Dalat, Vietnam! Looking forward to telling you all about it, but first… how we got here.

Since our last post, our flights to Frankfurt had been cancelled and unfortunately, we had booked a flight to Croatia separately. I spent hours online and on the phone with Chase Travel trying to find resolution and finally, just trying to get my money back. Their inability to help at all was a little disappointing. Chase had to wait for Vietjet to contact them back about the possibility of a refund or flight transfer, but it’s been 3 weeks and they still haven’t responded to any form of communication. I told Chase that I expected some sort of consumer protection, but I really had to fight with a smug customer service rep just to get a promise that they’d request a refund. No guarantees it will be granted. So… another $1,700 out the window. As I mentioned, we booked Croatia separately, we’d booked it with insurance, but when I asked them to refund our tickets on insurance because we couldn’t get to the departure location, they just didn’t reply. Another $400 gone.

Being in limbo, on June 1^st, we surrendered our passports and applied for another 60 day visa extension in Vietnam through August 12th, again with Lynn Visa for ~$300USD. This meant if Chase came back and found us a flight, we were committed to staying in Da Nang for 2 weeks while the Visa processed.

While we were waiting, Eva and I went to the closed-but-not-secured SunWorld Amusement park. They had a killer twisted coaster that I’d really wanted to try, but were never open in our 3 months in the city. It’s pretty amazing being in a mostly empty amusement park. They had a miniature representation of Ankor Thom, which we’d visited with my cousin Barry in Cambodia in 2018. It felt like we were getting away with something, but nobody really payed us any attention.

Da Nang was opening up. We found ourselves one night at Apocolypse Now on the beach smoking an apple flavored hookah and watching fire dancers. Another night, we went to Draft Beer Euro Village with its miniature garden Gold Hand bridge to watch fire & water erupt from the Dragon Bridge. We found a quaint little gastro pub called My Casa, owned by an exuberant Italian 28-year-old and her Spanish boyfriend serving tapas.

We also went through the effort to dissolve Sunborn Digital LLC which we’d opened when we were still looking for ways to become Location Independent. Tennessee Secretary of State has NOT made this easy to do from here. Application for Termination + Tax Clearance, sign, print and mail it in… no not THAT Tax Clearance, a different one, try again, and send it to this other place, too, along with a money order. None of this could be done online, so we jumped through their hoops, just so we don’t have to pay them taxes again next year and we can stop paying LegalZoom to be our Registered Agent, against our will.

So, that leaves us planning an exit strategy for Da Nang. We researched our options – I looked up cooler climate Vietnam (to try to escape the oppressive humidity) and stumbled upon Dalat and with much more research or preparation really, we made the decision. Our AirBnB reservation was set to expire on Monday, we picked up our Visa on Thursday, couldn’t order train tickets without a Vietnam Credit Card so on Friday, we went to the train station and bought our tickets and on Sunday at 1am, we were on a train 12 hours south to Thap Cham. In Thap Cham, we paid ~$50USD for a taxi to Dalat.

Dalat is a beautiful mountain town two hours from the coast. It’s heavily French influenced, but not very reminiscent of France. The rolling hills, anarchic traffic and chaotic street market make this very much its own. It also seems to have way fewer non-Asian tourists, but more international expats, which is exciting for us. It also seems to attract motorcycle enthusiasts and mountain biker-types as opposed to the beach types in Da Nang.

We found a great apartment overlooking the mountains and city with a Vin-Mart grocery story on the first floor, away from the madness of the town center. We were a little disappointed to find that our in-building market didn’t have bread, beef, chicken, pasta, potatoes or large bottles of water (we’re still avoiding tap water here). But some of the meat is available on occasion and we’ve found another, larger shopping center – the Big C SuperCenter – down the road.

It’s been incredible discovering a new town again. We’re very happy for our decision. We leave the door open most days to let the cool mountain air into our apartment. We’ve got a spare bedroom/bathroom and so have invited my brother and cousin to visit, with the caveat that they have to deal with the plane tickets & possible quarantine.

But we’re very excited to be down the road, exploring somewhere new, seeking friends in the local expat community.

Final observations:

Seems prudent at this time to be more flexible and to wait until the last possible moment to book travel. It may cost more, but you’re more likely to get what you pay for.

Sadly, I haven’t figured out a strategy for making travel arrangements with a guarantee of flight or money back. It’s a bad time for the consumer.

Grab (Asian Uber) is very buggy. It doesn’t work well, but there’s not a lot of alternative and mistakes aren’t very costly in Asia. Beware, pay close attention to source/destination and know that the GPS features are often wrong.