This is kind of a joke post and also an informative one to let people know that the claims about Vietnam being a very dirty place is quite true. I have seen charts about which countries in the world contribute the most to global pollution and Vietnam is always one of the top ones on the list. I am sure that these charts are at least somewhat rigged and are probably referring to something other than simply littering but I want to point out the stark difference between what you are likely to see if you are traveling here, and what the area really looks like once you get a few hundred meters away from the featured tourist areas.
Da Nang is actually a perfect example of this because when people visit this city, they very rarely exit a very small portion of it and if they do so, they will normally be on some sort of guided bus tour that will simply take them to another, also very controlled, tourist destination. There is nothing wrong with traveling this way, I will admit that it is a lot easier particularly if you don't speak Vietnamese and very few people that are not Vietnamese themselves actually do.
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Photos that you will see of various hot spots here in Vietnam such as Da Nang are almost certainly staged and heavily photoshopped. The above is no exception and probably had to be taken at a very specific time of day right after they cleaned up all the garbage that washes up on shore every day. Those waves are also not terribly surfable so I question whether or not the model in the picture even knows how to surf.
Here are some photos taken from a short walk that I did yesterday just a couple hundred meters away from the very clean beach areas of Da Nang. It's all an illusion is what I am trying to say. This city is actually very dirty.
Here we have a street, that is just outside of the popular hotel areas near the beach where the sidewalks are covered in various weeds, garbage, and other detritus. The fact that there is a broken down vehicle that has been in that same parking spot for the entire time that I have lived here speaks volumes. I question whether or not the owner is even around anymore.
This is a new sidewalk area that they built during Covid that they had thought would be a popular place for foot traffic as they redid all the streets and created these "gardens" along the side of the road. When people started to not turn up here as they had hoped, they begun completely ignoring the plants that they had initially put in there and as far as I know they never even watered them. These planting box areas are now completely overgrown with weeds and those aren't even cut at all.
The thing that is upsetting to me about this is that I "called it" when they were building these things. Da Nang seems to have an elaborate amount of money to start these projects but not enough money to actually maintain them. I remember when they were making all the noise building these things I was sitting with a friend at a noodle shop that is right across the road from it and say "you watch, in 18 months those are going to be completely ignored and overgrown with weeds just like the rest of the city." Sometimes I hate it when I am right because that is exactly what has happened.
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The beach boardwalk area is kept perfectly clean and free of garbage and there are plenty of trash cans / bins for you to dispose of your trash if you have any. In the areas that I have featured in my own pictures above, there are no municipal trash cans to speak of and therefore the landscape is just covered in plastic bags.
Outside of my own condo we have a communal garbage area and there actually are trucks that come by to pick it up. However, they don't put a great deal of care into ensuring that the garbage actually makes it into the truck so a great deal of it simply ends up on the ground and it stays there basically permanently. This is just a mere 2 blocks from the beach. As you get further and further from the tourist hotels the situation quickly becomes much worse and while I am happy they are doing something such as keeping the beach areas clean-ish, it would be nice if they had some sort of overhaul to the entire waste-management system here. This city, unless it is cleared up by private homeowners or hotels, is basically just one giant trash heap.
I don't know the solution here. Honestly, I don't think there is one. The notion that the entire city is as nice and manicured as the beach areas are is completely false though and I, myself, was actually duped into believing this was the case as before moving here I came down to "suss the place out" for 30 days before deciding to move here. Before taking the plunge I rarely left the tourist areas where I intended to live and it wasn't until after I had already moved here that I realized that 90% of this city just has garbage all over the place.
So why do I still live here? Well, despite the criticisms I have about how the government handles certain things the upside is that the government isn't involved in much of your life at all. If by ignoring littering this also comes with the government staying out of almost all other aspects of your life as well, then I can handle some garbage. This just means that I spend a great deal of time inside my condo and at the roof pool area because that is the areas that the owners can actually control.
I do get a bit frustrated whenever I take my dog for a walk though, because it seems as though more often than not we are wading through piles of trash everywhere that we go. Let's just say that in this environment I don't feel terribly compelled to pick up her poops when the entire area is covered in garbage already anyway.