Day 2 - Singapore Airport to Da Nang

Woke this morning rather early, still feeling pretty drained, realised that I was waking at my normal NZ wake up time, which meant I had only slept for about 4 hours, so eventually I was able to get myself back to sleep for another couple of hours.

Received a message from Mike to say they had landed, I decided I'd go meet up with them later on, but first I would take another quick look around to see what options I had nearby. While checking online I found out that the waterfall that I had seen the previous day had a night show on the house from 8pm, unfortunately I had already checked into my hotel and gone to sleep before finding this out, otherwise I would have been keen to see it. It's possible I did see some of it, but if it's what I thought I saw, it wasn't anything spectacular, just different colours of the waterfall to some music from Indiana Jones and some of the Marvel movies.

I got up, showered, checked out of the hotel, found out that the room I stayed in was a 10sq meter room. I roamed around a bit more of the Jewel complex, before making my way to Terminal 2 where I met up with Mike, Gill and their son James. I grabbed some food for breakfast as I was feeling pretty hungry and lacking a bit of energy. We roamed around the terminal a bit more before deciding to grab some lunch.

I think the travel is taking a bit of a toll on me as I'm still lacking much energy and I eventually needed to lay down outside the terminal and take a bit of a nap which has helped a little.

Eventually went through the terminal and onto the plane with my seat right at the back, I scored the isle seat, oddly enough the two seats next to me were empty. I was able to take a small 10 minute nap before waking and carrying on watching more of the series Duster. Rather enjoying it, its set back in the 1970's where a wheelman for a gangster and an FBI agent team up.

After arriving in Da Nang we made our way to our Hotel call Vol Soleil Hotel, based only a block away from the river... A nice rooftop pool overlooking the river and even a small gym if I feel the need. We hung out on the rooftop for about 30 minutes enjoying the views and also noticing that grown adults who were tall enough to stand up in the pool were still using floaties to get about... It's odd what we take for granted... And while I have friends who have only learnt to swim in recent years, I dont think I've ever seen them using floaties.

We decided to head out seeing we are only here for the one night and check out some of the sites, we ended up walking over one bridge which had the shape of a dragon weaving up and down over it, and then heading down the side of the river to another bridge, along the way stopping to notice all the boats lit up with Neon lights cruising up and down the river.

I couldn't help but notice all the drivers and motorbikes either, all the tooting of their horns, it reminded me of being back in Thailand or Bahrain.

When we got to the other bridge we crossed stopping along the way to notice the light show coming from the lighting, it was weird as it rather regular but only started at a certain height in the clouds and also didn't hear any thunder, then again, with all the tooting of the motorbikes and cars, they possibly drowned out the noise. We then headed back down along the river toward our hotel, stopping along the way for a meal at a little restaurant called Bep Lua. I got a Beer, can of Coke and some beef noodles, coming to a massive 167,890 VND, which converts to about NZD $11, that also includes a 3% credit card fee, but that won't break the bank.

Upon arriving back at the hotel, we decided to get 30 minutes to relax before heading back up to the swimming pool, apparently there is a light show on the bridge which is a must see. We got up onto the top level by the pool, seems like a few of the other guests had the same idea. I was suprised to see the lightning was still flickering away, managed to grab a little video of that as well.

The light show on the bridge begun, and unless you were specifically looking for it, you would likely miss it as it did not last long at all... All the lighting show involved was the dragon head of the bridge blowing a few flames and that was it. They shut the entire bridge down for traffic while this goes on as well, seems like a lot of work for a few puffs of flames.