One of the things that plagues those of us that live in the particular part of Da Nang that I, and most other foreigners live in, is that the rapid expansion has resulted in almost everywhere being a construction site.
I had hope in the latter stages of 2025 that the construction in my particular part of the city was going to soon be coming to and end based simply on the fact that there isn't any more land and therefore, no more space for anyone to possibly build anything. At the moment there are 5 mid to large construction projects that are soon going to be finished and the hope was that at that point we would finally get some peace and quiet.
The way it has been for the past 2 years is that you have to keep your windows shut from 7am to 7pm every day because the banging, grinding, heavy equipment, and general shouting of workers just fills the air nonstop.
Then the other day I walked out the front door of my condo to see this.
So what is it? This is a military installation of some sort that is smack dab in the middle of all the tourism places in my hood. It was always considered to be untouchable and we would never need to worry about any building being done there because the Vietnamese government, and especially the military, doesn't give up their land to anyone. it isn't for sale at any price.... or is it?
For many years longer than I have lived here this large spot of land, which is probably worth tens of millions of dollars has just been a parking lot and also some small gardens where the soldiers would raise some crops and they even had a duck and chicken coop at one end of the property. The entire facility was surrounded by an old iron fence and nobody ever messed with it. We were all convinced that this one spot would be immune from the continual expansion (I would say over-expansion) of the tourism infrastructure of the area.
In the past few days all of these structures have been torn down, and now I am getting really worried.
A few of the ducks remain and I would imagine they are seriously confused about what the hell is going on and where their houses went.
This was all razed in just a few days with some level of urgency. Now all we can do is wait and see what happens. The government doesn't tell anyone what they are up to, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much other logical reason for them to tear down the gardens, the covers for the vehicle storage, and the chicken coops all at once unless they intend to build on this land.
The land is so large that if they do put a structure on it, it is likely going to be extremely massive, and take many years to complete. It is directly opposite the windows of my condo building and we were just starting to get optimistic that this relentless noise was finally coming to an end.
This is all very depressing to me because quiet comes at a premium in this part of the world and now it appears as though the finish line has been, yet again, moved many years into the future.
Now I wake up every day hoping to see that perhaps they are just going to repave the lot or something like that but this seems unlikely. There wasn't really enough activity going on at this military space to justify a remaking of the pavement. I fear that they are going to start bringing in diggers soon and once that happens, we can abandon all hope that we will have a quiet neighborhood.
I often question why it is that I continue to live here. It really does drive one mad after a while.. .not being to ever experience a bit of quiet.