Ba Na Hills (Vietnam)
07 October 2023
The next destination on our list was a place that I only came across very recently and it was directly due to the myriad of Instagram posts that devoted shot after shot to monolithic, almost God like hands of concrete cast against a backdrop of ethereal blue…but more of that in a moment, let me get to the intro.
As a visitor we had been pre-warned, ‘prepare yourselves for a rollercoaster ride through all four seasons in a single day’. Now, coming from Melbourne, this the typical line that will greet any travel on their arrival to our city. In fact, just the other day I was on a ‘Melbourne Facebook page’ where the comment was to come up with a logo to exemplify and showcase what’s special about our city. None too surprising that ‘expect four seasons in a day’ was one of most popular lines that us Melburnians wanted to utilise in order to showcase the city (strange but true). So, we should have paid a little more attention of what Ba Na Hills was advocating before rolling up at 3pm on a typical weekday afternoon. Still, you just don’t associate a 15-18 degree drop in temperature when you’re wearing shorts, experiencing a lovely sunny day, and only driving about 20kms inland from the coast.
Ba
Na Hills has been known as the shining star of Vietnam's tourist spots,
especially in Central Vietnam. In fact, it bagged the "Top Tourist Resort
of Vietnam" crown four years in a row from 2015 to 2018. In its 11-year
journey, Sun World Ba Na Hills has become the go-to spot for locals and
globetrotters alike in Danang, and sure, there’s reasonable reasons to support
the local endearment and foreign fascination. First there’s the outlandish
cable car system, it’s incredible and globally recognised. Not that the
plaudits from CNN should have any real bearing on its significance but they did
rank the network as one of the most 10 impressive cable car infrastructure
systems globally. Comprising of 5 different routes, there is an accumulated
capacity of 7000 people an hour that can get moved from the car-park to the
mountain top village. It also holds a number of accolades and records alike,
specifically, the Toc Tien-L’Indochine line which maintains Guiness World
Record status for the longest one-wire sling, the greatest elevation between
stations, the longest unpatched wire and the heaviest cable roll in the world.
All of this you can both experience and witness in the 17 mins ride that will
take you to the mountain top.
For
me, the real highlight was visiting the 150m long Golden Bridge that’s
supported by the ‘hands of God’. As I’ve mentioned earlier, surely this placed
has been Instagrammed to death but that doesn’t mean, to me at least, that the
place isn’t worth the visit. I’ll never understand how a location suddenly
starts to draw attention for being ‘over photographed’ and starts to be spoken
of in lessor terms just for people popular. We arrived on what was a fairly
dreary, cold-ish, mid-week day, with an average crowd, and I still thought it
was spectacular. Certainly, if I was to suggest the best time to be here then
I’d say at sunset – the colours & the mood shift the scene into something
extraordinarily magical, and by that time the foot traffic would have reduced
significantly. My hot-tip, come late afternoon or early evening.
Certainly
the Golden Bridge isn’t the only thing to see at Sun World, just a
short-cable car ride up the mountain is a lovely representation of a French Village,
a time machine that drops you smack dab in serene, old-school France, complete
with squares, churches, old villages, and cozy inns. Sure, it’s not ‘authentic’
and yes, ‘its touristy’, but who cares. Experiences can be constructed in a
number of ways. If you’ve travelled Europe and ‘know your real from your
rip-off deal’ and if you think you may feel somewhat ‘offended’ by a European
replica in Vietnam, then don’t come. The thing is, this place isn’t really
built with you in mind, it’s resort and location built for the people of
Vietnam that may never get to experience the true wonders of Europe but can
have access to something in their backyard that provides them with something
unique and enjoyable. Coupled with that, there’s also a plethora of restaurants
scattered across the mountain top, Asia & European food, diverse buffets –
it’s an experience.
We
all had fun during our visit and I’m glad that we took a few hours out of our
day in Hoi An to come up here. I’d even say that it would be worth a dedication
of a few more hours on our next visit as we only allowed ourselves 3-3.5hrs in
total and there seemed like much more to see and do here, especially on a nicer
day.
