Danang Day 1

It has been a long awaited holiday, and it has finally arrived! We were on our way to Danang, Vietnam for the long awaited respite from the daily grind, and how happy we were to leave our normal lives for a short trip to feel carefree and joyous again. We eagerly packed up our bags the previous day and we waited the night for the day to come.

Soon it was the morning of the 8th of June, and we called a taxi to bring us to the airport. We were going to set off from Terminal 2 instead of the now rather familiar to us Terminal 3. This is because we were going to be flying on Silkair. We checked in rather early to get an opportunity to do something that Ashley had wanted to do for a long time, which was to dine at the Hello Kitty Cafe at Terminal 3. To my dismay, I had realised that they have removed the Skytrain that connects both Terminal 2 and 3, so we had to take the walking route to make our way to Terminal 3.

To our surprise, there were not any people waiting in line to get into the Hello Kitty cafe, and after a short fuss on looking for the entrance, we were quickly seated and treated to some early breakfast. However, as the food was rather pricey, we decided to dine light. We ordered some Truffle Fries, a Big Breakfast Platter which consists of a waffle, pancakes and sausages as well as the Hello Kitty nachos to share. However, we were not particularly impressed with the food there as well as the ambience. Being the Hello Kitty cafe, we were expecting much more Hello Kitty theme things, but I suspect that they were trying to cater to a larger audience, and that ended up in them losing in some style points in making the cafe much more cutesy. This felt like a missed opportunity for them, and I hope they will work on making the cafe truer to it’s name.

To remedy our lack of satisfaction, we checked in at the nearby Wang, where we ordered some Eggs, Toast and a Laska as well as a Mee Soto. This was much closer to what we wanted in an early breakfast and after a cup of Kopi, we were quickly satisfied. We soon had to get walking back to Terminal 3 and we waited for the gate to open so we could quickly board the flight. On our way to the gate, we also took the time to stop-by the Times at the Terminal so that we could get some magazines to read. We then soon boarded the flight towards Danang International Airport.

It was only a short two hour flight to Vietnam and it was very easy to cope with after we had gone through the several multi-day flights that we had to take take to get to the United States. Food was also served on the flight, and it was pretty good. We had spicy noodles with chicken, and it was much better than the Silkair food of old. We were pretty impressed with the food.

Soon, we arrived at Danang International Airport. Luckily, we did not need to take a bus to connect us with the Terminal as they had the gate set up for this flight. We soon passed customs and quickly were greeted by some hotel staff that were going to bring us to the resort we were going to stay at, the Angsana. We were quickly shuffled onto the van (A Ford Transit) and we rode on it for about an hour as we caught our first glimpses of Vietnam. We were on the shuttle bus out of Danang, to an area known as Lang Co. We passed through Danang City, and through a long tunnel that cut straight through a mountain pass. We were soon arriving at the Hotel.

The Angsana was next to another, more expensive resort called the Banyan Tree. The cheaper, more economical option that we were staying at was not an individual bungalow, but we were able to get a ground floor room, which allowed us direct access to the beach. We entered the lobby, where we were greeted with the free gifts of Macaroons and wrist bands. This was a nice surprise as we did not expect anything of the sort. We also had a quick tour of the hotel by the friendly staff and we laughed as we saw just how big the Angsana was. It reminded us very much of the Venetian and how far we had to walk to get to our car as well.

When we finally caught glimpse of the room, we were awe-struck. It was huge and the view was amazing. There was a separate living area, flanked by two individual bedrooms. This was just superb and unlike anything that I have experienced before. There was a private pool just for our room, and there was a direct access gate to the beach. (No really! It was less than 5 meters from our room!). We were getting so comfortable in the room we almost didn’t want to get up for dinner, but we eventually did.

We headed to the Watercourt restaurant, which was only a short buggy trip away as it was in the Banyan Tree resort and not the resort we were staying at.

We had some trouble looking for the place at first, but at last we were directed to the correct place and got seated. One thing we noticed right away was the distinct lack of people. Although we expected many tourists, for the majority of the dinner we were only accompanied by one other couple in the whole restaurant. To no worries, we ordered a pre-defined set of food that was on the menu to get a sampler of the Vietnamese cuisine. This was accompanied with some fried egg noodles for Ashley, as we were not sure that she would enjoy the food particularly well. We had a treat of Prawn Cakes with Sugar Cane, Seafood soup and some chicken.

  

By the end of the meal we were satisfied and wanted to get back to the hotel. By the time we headed out, my mom asked “How are we ever going to get back to the room?”. To which, almost as if on que, the buggy had rolled up to the pick-up area. We all had a great laugh and headed back to the room, where we rested for the rest of the night.