Da Nang: river, beach and pagoda
Han River · My Khe · Linh Ung Pagoda · Cham Museum
Illustrative regional or transport photo; not a promised stop. ©
Begin at the river, follow the beach north and stop at the pagoda overlooking the bay. Return to the city for Cham sculpture and an unhurried seafood meal.
A city between the river and the mountain
Da Nang is easy to read from a motorcycle seat. The Hàn River runs almost due north for about ten kilometres through the centre and empties into the bay under six bridges; the beach lies a short ride east of it, and the green bulk of Sơn Trà closes the bay to the north-east. Almost everything in this guide sits inside that triangle. The old name of the place was Cửa Hàn, ‘mouth of the Hàn’, which the French turned into Tourane when they made it their port in the 1880s. Before that, in August 1858, a French and Spanish fleet chose the Sơn Trà peninsula as the first target of the campaign that opened the colonial war — the mountain you will ride around in the afternoon was the front line. Today the same river is best known for the Dragon Bridge, 666 metres long and opened on 29 March 2013; on Saturday and Sunday nights at nine the dragon breathes fire and water, and the promenade fills with families on scooters. We start the day here on purpose: the river is where the city wakes up, and the riverside boulevard is the calmest way to get your bearings before the beach traffic builds.
Sơn Trà: the mountain that shelters the bay
Sơn Trà is not a hill but a mountain massif standing in the sea — about 13 kilometres long, up to 5 wide, with its highest point at 696 metres, joined to the mainland by a sandspit the Hàn built over the centuries. Together with the Hải Vân ridge in the north it forms the arc that turns Da Nang Bay into a natural harbour and a shield against typhoons. The peninsula was closed as a ‘forbidden forest’ in 1977, and in 1992 the Ministry of Forestry declared it a nature reserve of about 4,400 hectares; it holds close to a thousand plant species and is the best-known home of the red-shanked douc, a langur with rust-red legs that you may see in the trees above the road early in the morning if you switch the engine off. The road that climbs from the pagoda towards Bàn Cờ peak is steep, cambered and sometimes closed to automatic scooters — this is why our plan calls it ‘the pagoda approach’ rather than a promised loop of the whole mountain. American forces built a radar station and gun positions here during the war and called it Monkey Mountain; the fenced military areas are still there, so stay on the public road.
Linh Ứng and the Lady Buddha
There are three pagodas called Linh Ứng around Da Nang — one in the Marble Mountains, one on Bà Nà, and this one at Bãi Bụt on the flank of Sơn Trà, the largest and youngest of the three. The first stone was laid in 2004 and the temple was inaugurated on 30 July 2010 after six years of building. Its landmark is the statue of Quan Thế Âm, the bodhisattva of compassion, 67 metres tall on a lotus base 35 metres across — the tallest such statue in Vietnam. Fishermen call her the Lady Buddha; she faces the sea, and from the terrace you look straight back across the bay at the city skyline and the beach you have just ridden along. Entry is free, the grounds cover about twenty hectares, and the etiquette is simple: cover shoulders and knees, keep the engine noise for the road, and park in the car park below the gate rather than on the temple steps.
Champa in stone
Long before Da Nang existed, this coast belonged to Champa, a network of Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms whose temple towers still stand at Mỹ Sơn inland. The French archaeologists of the École française d’Extrême-Orient began gathering Cham statues in a ‘garden of sculptures’ by the river at the end of the nineteenth century; Henri Parmentier proposed a museum in 1902, building began in 1915, and the first hall opened in 1919 with 160 pieces. Extensions followed in 1936 and 2002. The collection now counts more than 2,000 objects with close to 400 on display, dating from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century and arranged by the site where each was found — Trà Kiệu, Mỹ Sơn, Đồng Dương, Tháp Mẫm. It is the largest collection of Cham sculpture anywhere and, at the tail of the Dragon Bridge, the natural last stop of the day: an hour in cool halls after a hot mountain road, then seafood a few streets away.
Why the day is shaped this way
The beach road, Võ Nguyên Giáp, runs the whole length of Mỹ Khê and its neighbours and is wide, flat and lit; it is at its best before nine in the morning, when the city swims and runs before work and the sand is still empty. Mỹ Khê itself is the central 900-metre stretch — part of it was a rest beach for American soldiers before 1975 — and it merges north into Phạm Văn Đồng and Mân Thái, where the fishing boats and the seafood restaurants are. From there Hoàng Sa road turns onto the peninsula and becomes a proper mountain road: pagoda first, then the choice of climbing on towards the viewpoint or turning back. We ride the mountain in the middle of the day when it is quietest and come down for the museum and dinner. Total riding is short, 35–55 kilometres, but with the beach, the temple and the museum it fills a day without hurry. One rule for the whole plan: drive on the right, keep to the marked lanes on the bridges, and remember that at the Dragon Bridge shows the bridge itself is closed to traffic for the duration.
We lead this ride ourselves.
The guide is from our team, the route is one we have ridden, and you have one chat with us for the whole trip.
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