Stormy season once again reveals how dirty the water is in Vietnam

Da Nang, for the most part, does a pretty good job of keeping the areas popular with tourists clean and tidy. There are bins all over the place, the gardens are maintained, they actually enforce parking rules, and generally just create a nice space for the most popular beach areas that are frequented by tourists here.

Those of us that live here are quite aware of the fact that the city and the country as a whole has a pretty terrible track record as far as waste management and pollution are concerned though and when typhoon season rolls through here, the powers that be cant keep up with getting all the trash off the beaches. It's actually pretty disgusting as I discovered when going on a beach walk the other day.

These photos don't really do justice to how bad it actually is. When I walk on the beach, I like to be in that "sweet spot" where the ocean meets the sand to keep the floor solid so that it is good for walking, but not so far out in the water that your feet are sinking in the sand. That is where most people like to walk.

This was a really disgusting day to do that though because the area I am referring to was a cauldron of plastic trash getting washed back and forth and there was also polystyrene as well as dead fish bobbing back and forth as well. It wasn't really inviting to anyone that was considering going for a swim and I kind of felt bad for the people that were on towels with their kids and was thinking to myself "are you seriously going to let your children swim in that?"

Most of the people were staying out of the water and likely contemplating if there is something else they could go and do while they are visiting Da Nang instead. Something jungle oriented perhaps?

The real problem here in my mind is that this isn't some rare occurrence, it happens every year. This garbage is swirling around in the sea just off the coast all year every year, the government workers are just normally able to clean it up in time before most of the tourists ever see any of it. If you stray just a bit away from the main tourist beaches where the big hotels and municipal workers are constantly picking up trash though, the ocean and beach tells a very different story.

There was volunteers wandering around to pick up trash and there were some social media initiatives to get out there and help to clean the beach, mostly headed up by expats. I'm not saying the Vietnamese don't do this as well, I'm sure they do. I just can't read Vietnamese so I don't hear about it.

I always find this sort of volunteer work, because while admirable, that trash is going to end up in the same place that resulted in it being in the ocean in the first place but now you have added dozens of black plastic trash bags to the problem as well. It's a nice gesture sure, but there is something fundamentally wrong with the waste management here and until that is addressed and corrected, the beaches are always going to look like this, especially if they aren't constantly monitored and maintained.

I don't spend a lot of time in the water because of this. If there is that much visible garbage floating around, how much is there in there that you don't see?

I was an avid SCUBA diver years ago and some of the things I would see while underwater diving in SE Asia was just shocking. It's basically a gigantic plastic dump site.

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Your guess is as good as mine as to how this information is acquired, but I would be willing to bet that not a great deal has changed since 2010, nor is it likely to.

Vietnam is a rather poor country and I like to remain positive and say that they are trying the best that they can. There are bins all over the place and at least it gets carried away to somewhere. But I have been out to the countryside and encountered massive swaths of heaped up garbage and it is often on a cliffside over a body of water where is almost certainly eventually blows down the side and makes its way to the sea.

It's all a bit depressing if I think about it too much because I really don't know anything that could be done to correct this. If the international community threw a bunch of money at it, this money would likely be refused by the communist government and if it wasn't, it would be mismanaged and stolen just like governments all around the world do when they are given free stuff.

Nadi is blissfully unaware of things like this, but I discovered a new look of hers that I will dub "The Karen." She does kind of look like she needs to speak to the manager, doesn't she?