They are actually cleaning up the streets in Da Nang: I'm in shock!

Vietnam isn't great at maintaining their public spaces outside of a few of them. On the beachfront in the tourist areas they are meticulous about keeping things presentable for the thousands of tourists that come here on a regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually the massive number of hotels that are across the street that are funding this though. It would make sense that they are because as soon as you travel a few hundred meters away from tourist areas the trash element of this country becomes very evident. I have shown this many times in the past.

About 2 years ago where was this stretch of road quite near my apartment and it leads to the beach. The city came by and planted all these wonderful plants in these areas next to the street and then simply walked away from it. As expected, these new potted plant areas quickly became overrun with weeds and garbage and it remained that way for around a year and a half.

I don't know what prompted this and again, it may actually be the property that is next to it that is going the work, but it is nice to see that someone is finally doing something.

In the distance of this picture you can see the new plants that have been put down as they move their way down the street. This is not the first time and they appear to be the exact same plants that they put in there the first time around. Hopefully they actually come by and water then and clean it up every now and then this time around lest exactly the same thing end up happening again.

If they don't do it, eventually the only solution is going to be what you see here in this above picture: All of the plants and everything else will have to be completely pulled out. I'm not a gardener but even I know that you can't have nice things growing in this sort of dirt unless you tend to it a bit. The constant influx of mostly plastic garbage certainly doesn't help.

I'm not holding my breath on this actually happening though. I've seen far too many projects like this come and go as if they lose their enthusiasm for actually keeping it looking nice and are merely interested in getting it looking nice for a little while, probably so some politician can get some photos done and claim that it is because of him or her that this is happening. Once the pictures and the ceremony are done they just walk away and forget about it.

It's a shame because this area has a great potential to be a nice place to walk. Now if they could just do something about the horrible graffiti that covers nearly the entire wall of this massive church complex that is inside of it.

It isn't much, but it is a step in the right direction. I would like to see some sort of signage go up encouraging the locals to take some sort of pride in their surroundings because I can say from 5 years of living here that it isn't the foreigners that are tossing their garbage all over the place.