Vietnam 10 - Ba Na Hills

The picture that raced around the internet. 

This photo (well one like it taken by someone else) which took off like wildfire last summer is a picture of the Golden Bridge.  It opened for the public here in June of 2018.  The eerie sense of power and mysticism that the image provoked sent me immediately to find out where this bridge was.

So – I was delighted to learn that this bridge was located very close to Hoi An.

And it also turned out that this bridge was not a recently discovered ancient treasure. 

Nope – it is part of a theme park called Sunworld Ba Na Hills. 

This certainly reduced the cool factor for me, but good little tourist that I am, I still wanted to go.  I could not possibly be so close without taking the actual photos for myself.

Most of the photos I had seen, plus the internet chatter, showed crowds of people on the bridge.  Crowds are not my thing so we needed to find a way to reduce or eliminate the crowds.  First – pick a day that is not during the Tet holidays when local people and children are available.  Next go as early as possible to be there when the park opens.  This involved a 6:30 am pick up by our driver (we work with a local company and hire a car with driver if we wish to go anywhere outside of bicycle or taxi range).

Got to the park on schedule and were absolutely one of the first folks up the cable car.

This cable car was the other reason we wanted to go to this park.  There are 5 here, to take you from the base operation up the mountain, to where the action is.  The cable car is amazing.  It is the largest and highest non-stop cable car system in the world.  The trip takes 15 minutes and the views are wonderful.  CNN named it as one of the 10 most impressive cable car systems world wide.

The cable car we took essentially ends at the Golden Bridge and as two of the first guests, the crowds on the bridge were very few.  Interestingly there were a few bridal couples there getting their wedding day photos.  I suspect the photographers have tricks to get rid of the background folks.

Bridge in the morning mist

At that time of day though, the weather was a bit misty, or perhaps we were in the clouds.  In any case we had the opportunity to take our time on the bridge and not be herded along, so the early start was a complete success.

Another random body part

The stuff at the top of the mountain fall into about 4 main categories, French village, amusement park/arcade, gardens and religious.

The whole French village on a mountain in Vietnam seemed a bit odd, but it turns out that the French actually has a resort there that was founded in 1919.  There is even an actual wine cellar left over from those days (built in 1923).  The rest of the buildings of course are done to look like an old French village, but in fact are newly built, kind of like a blend of Disney and Las Vegas.  That said, they look surprisingly OK, and this was an aspect of the trip that I had had concerns about.  To my delight it wasn’t nearly as cheesy as we thought it might be.

The amusement park/arcade consists of two main parts – one part is pair of a sort of, kind of, roller coaster done with individual cars that are not linked.  Those lines were very long, so no to that.  The rest though is quite cool.  You enter a building at ground level and from that point the building opens up going down with each floor focusing on a different thing – games, movies, wax museum, bumper cars and a drop zone.

Drop zone inside the building

The religious aspect of the park was very intriguing.  There are two main areas – one is a giant 27 m high sitting Buddha.  

Religion is an active part of people’s days here and there was incense being burned, and people worshiping.  There was also a different area full of pagodas and some temples.  This area was practically empty when we were there and quite lovely.

Finally time to head home, and we again stopped to check out the bridge.  The sun was out by now and so were the crowds (and even one late to the party bride).    The crowds, while large, were not overpowering and we still managed to get a couple of reasonable photos.

On the way to meet our driver, at the base of the mountain, we came across the lost and found.  What a hoot!  People leave a lot of things.  Purses on the top rack (plus a side that this photo does not show.  The bottom two rows are cell phones and small cameras.