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Today we decided to go on another tour to see, what we believed was, one of the highlights of the Da Nang area, the Golden Hand Bridge. Today our Tour Guide was Toan, we were picked up at 07:40.
The ride to Ba Na hills, was about 1 hour. Toan explained on the way that Ba Na Hills gets it's name from Banana Hills, it was a place that the French went to to find a climate that they were more accustomed to. In those days the French were carried up the hills by locals which would take around 12 hours. Ba Na Hills now is a theme park owned by Sunworld which is like the Vietnamese equivalent of The Tussaurds Group in the UK that own Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, etc but not quite as exciting.
To get to Ba Na Hills now a days you can't get locals to carry you but instead there are many Cable Cars, that take you to different parts of the park. The one. that we went on took over 2 minutes to get there. The views were spectacular until we ascended into the clouds.
Once at the top we got to the Golden Hand Bridge, it would have been absolutely stunning if we weren't in the clouds and could see more than a few metres in front of us.
Once at the end of the bridge there was a gift shop, fortunately there was a bag that showed the bridge in all its glory.
Once we'd finished at the bridge we went to explore the ornamental gardens, it was like a poor example of Port Merion, which we'd visited a year earlier.
When we went back to the Bridge to get the next cable car to the next area, the clouds had started to clear and we could actually see the bridge clearly.
The next highlight of Bar Na Hills was what they called the roller coaster, it turns out it's so much a roller coaster but more of a alpine sledge. In the queue for the ride I met a couple from Sydney, the asked me about my t-shirt. I was wearing my Leftfield t-shirt from Amsterdam, I told them about leftfield and they were very excited and were keen on techno I also let them know that Leftfield were playing Sydney in March.
The sledge ride was pretty disappointing you got to control the speed by pushing the levers forward. Although when your sledge got to close to the one in front it automatically applied the breaks, the person in front of me was going pretty slow so the breaks kept applying.
Once I'd finished on the ride, Susan and I went to find the international restaurant, there were two restaurants the other was an Indian vegetarian. Getting there was a long way and we had to descend many escalators. When we got close I suddenly became very ill and needed to run to the toilet, fortunately I made it just in time.
In the restaurant, Susan ate and I was just not up to it.
Once we'd eaten we decided that it would be best if we just went back to the hotel rather than spending the next few hours in the theme park. We let Toan know that we were leaving and he came and made sure that we got back to the correct cable car.
On the way down, in the cable car, I looked at booking a grab taxi. Due to the size of the car park the taxi pick-up point was quite away from the entrance. So I decided that I'd book the taxi once we'd got to the pick-up point. Once at the entrance we were approached by a taxi driver with the grab logo on his phone, like the night in Hoi An, to be fair I was absolutely delighted to see him I really didn;t want to walk any further. I looked at the cost back to our hotel and we settled on 400,000 VND.
The journey was quite quick and we were back in about 40 minutes, which also was some relief to me the state I was in, we gave the driver a 500,000 VND but he said that he had no change, I just was not in any state to argue.
Back in the hotel, I went straight to bed after having a shower. Just as I settled down I got a WhatsApp message from Vietnam Trains:
Your train se10 at 9am tomorrow to hue is cancelled. please go to da nang station to complete the refund procedure. thank you
This meant that tomorrow we had no train to take us to Huế. Although I was pretty impressed that we'd been told, at home we wouldn't have found out until we'd got to the station.
Having this knowledge meant that Eleanor was able to book us on a later train to Huế.
After a few hours of sleep, I was feeling better, not well enough to go out and meet the others in Hội An but well enough to watch Lando Norris win the Formula 1 drivers championship. Once this finished we watched the second half of the Brighton v West Ham game West Ham were winning until Brighton equalised in the 91st minute.