I have a short answer and a long answer. Here's the short one: I have never experienced a less expensive place to live anywhere in the world that was also safe. It is remarkably cheap here. I know people that live all around the world and I have lived in 5 different countries. Vietnam is by FAR the least expensive country to live in and it is so cheap that I can't really wrap my head around how it is possible that things cost as little as they do here.
Now for the long answer:
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When I first moved to Da Nang, it wasn't supposed to be for this long. I had come here to attempt to expand a business a friend of mine has involving tobacco grown and packaged in Thailand only to discover via a lawyer that it is nigh on impossible to import tobacco products into this country. This was probably something I could have researched from abroad but basically the lawyer told me that the only products not made in Vietnam that are allowed through customs are luxury items such as cigars. These have such massive import duties put upon them that they are one of the few things in this country that costs considerably more than it would somewhere else in the world. He said we could "try" but the process of simply attempting to open an import channel like this was going to be remarkably expensive and would be subjected to a huge amount of corruption as well. I spoke to the owner of the company about how we were going to need around $50,000 simply to "try" to set up this company and the answer was a resounding "hell to the no."
So that ended my attempt at becoming a business partner with the person I know in Chiang Mai that has the tobacco farms.
From that point forward I was just going to stay here for a bit longer because even though I constantly regale my friends and family - as well as strangers on the internet - about how wonderfully cheap it is here, I also think it is quite boring. This has a lot to do with the fact that I have a dog that I care for more than most people do their human children and basically, I won't go anywhere without her for more than a day or two.
Therefore, I haven't even seen most of what this country has to offer and as sad as it sounds, I rarely even leave my neighborhood. It isn't necessary to be honest. I can see the beach from my condo and the stuff on the other side of the river is really just more of what we have over here, just busier.
The other night we went over to a friend's house and he thought it was kind of amusing how much difficulty we had in finding it, but this has everything to do with the fact that I never planned to be here this long and I never bothered learning the topography of any of it.
This place was only 6 miles or so from my neighborhood but I had no idea where I was even when standing on the rooftop of his building. Before my bicycle was stolen I had made at least some effort to get to know the neighboring areas, but i'm not going to do that on foot.
Now for the real reason why my 1 year visa turned into a now more than 3 year stay. A little thing you might have heard of in the news called COVID-19. For more than a year travel was damn near impossible especially if you are trying to bring a dog around with you. I was never going to abandon Nadi, nor will I ever, so I just kept extending my visa. Thankfully, the Vietnamese government was very accommodating as far as this was concerned, and it was rather effortless to anyone that was willing to pay the around $100 a month to extend their visa indefinitely.
I don't recall for exactly how long this went on but Vietnam, even though they played it cool at first, went just as bananas as any other country in the world as far as Covid was concerned. At one point travel from one province to another wasn't allowed without testing, then travel between provinces wasn't allowed at all, after that we were restricted to individual neighborhoods, and after that we were restricted to just the interior of our own buildings. This went on a for a long time and I am sure all of you have your own stories about how terrible that time was but in my situation it wasn't that bad because food delivery was still allowed, my building has a gym and a pool, and my best friend Nadi was living in the same room as me at all times. If it was left up to her, Nadi would probably have preferred that Covid restrictions had gone on forever.
But now here we are 38 months into what was meant to be a 6-12 month trip and I'm kind of feeling like I want to move on, but it is just such a pain in the ass to go anywhere when you have a dog in tow. I'm going to do it anyway, likely in the next few months and I will almost certainly return to Chiang Mai, which is my favorite place in South East Asia. Beaches just don't really do it for me anymore since I have spent nearly 20 years of my life living at them.
I will always have some sort of fondness for Vietnam and especially Da Nang but this is mainly because of the fact that for $1000 a month or less depending on how you decide to live, you can easily live here without issues.
The time has come to move on though and while I am such a procrastinator when it comes to these kind of things I will likely start to investigate getting back over to Thailand. I do still recommend that people check out Vietnam and especially Da Nang because I honestly have never lived in a place so inexpensive while still being incredibly safe. I guess you could say I am just a bit bored here and Nadi doesn't really care where we live, as long as she is with me.