Destinations known | New cable cars in Vietnam are springing up across the country. But not everyone is on board
- The success of Vietnam’s existing cable cars is driving the building of new ones, with every resort development worth its salt having such transport worked into its plans
- Operators stand accused, however, of inflicting a negative impact on the environment and providing little benefit for local communities
What is it with Vietnam and cable cars? They are springing up like welts across the country.
If Joni Mitchell had been a modern Vietnamese singer, she might have sung, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, to serve the new cable car”. (Neatly enough, if you hail a Vinataxi, it could well be a Big Yellow one.)
The latest cables opened to take tourists from A to B – or in this case from Vietnam to France – are extensions of a system in Da Nang’s Truong Son mountain range.
“Visitors […] now can easily reach Vang (Golden) Bridge to enjoy spectacular surrounding landscapes thanks to a newly inaugurated cable car system,” reports the Vietnam+ website. “The cable car route, named ‘Hoi An – Marseille’, and another named ‘Bordeaux – Louvre’, to the mountain peak, were the new facilities unveiled at Sun World Ba Na Hills on March 18, when this site reopened to visitors after a hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The only post-Covid review of Sun World Ba Na Hills to be found on TripAdvisor (at the time of writing), apparently by a visitor from Britain, is fairly scathing of the “fake” attraction, but does concede that, “If I am absolutely honest, the cable car journey to and from the ‘French’ village was very very good.”
