There is a train from Hue to Da Nang. Apparently you'd be mad to take it - it's rated as slow and grimy and distinctly 3rd world. Unless of course you want some I'm-so-cool travel cred by mixing in with the locals and the chicken shit. By road the pace is placid but lots quicker and you can still mix with locals and their randomly discarded garbage such as at a lagoon-side cafe of an oyster farmer at Lang Co. Said cafe was spick and span, however the shoreline of the lagoon is calf-deep in discarded motor-scooter inner-tubes (used to grow oyesters on) and mounds of plastic. Whenever i read the hyperbolic descriptions of the beauty of this place i feel like screaming "FFS, look down!" Vietnam has a significant garbage disposal problem and they need to face up to it.
A sleepy fishing village until the Americans turned it into a huge airbase during the Vietnam War and where they landed their first ground troops. It's been transformed again, this time into a modern and tidy metropolis of tall buildings, busy but wide main thoroughfares and treed streets. Quite a pleasant city, particularly on the river front but a bit too generic to stay over. The 9km strip of grass and sand of China Beach is now being over-run by huge, horrible resort/hotel/casino developments.
At the far end of China Beach and readily accessible by road, the Mountains contain 17th century Buddhist sanctuaries and pagodas set high up in the caves and caverns with the old-school Non Nuoc village at their bases.
A lovely little place despite its prominence on the must-see shedules of tour companies. Hotels are restricted to the perimeter, maintaining the integrity of the low-rise Chinese, French-colonial and Japanese architecture although most houses have been sold by the community to speculators and shop owners to be used for commercial purposes. Daily commerce still addresses the locals' needs at the markets while primarily catering to visitors' desire to spend their travel budgets at typically excellent Vietnamese eateries and tailor shops. I've read a few reviews that whinge that restaurant prices and cyclio rides are way more expensive than elsewhere in Vietnam. Maybe expensive in Vietnamese terms but still value in AUS$. And don't take a cyclio - walk FFS.
Speaking of cyclios i was tempted to start an international incident by tipping a smug chubby Chinese tourist out of one when a never-ending stream of these selfie-sticked, colour-coded wankers prevented me from simply crossing the street.
21 windy kilometers of switchbacks traversing a spur of the Annamite Range between Lang Co and Da Nang. The Pass is infamous for the number of fatalities - the roadside is adourned with small monuments to those very many who had not made it all the way across. While i appreciate the Buddhist karma of the local motoring public i would recommend to the Vietnamese road authorities that they pay some attention to the skills required to safely negotiate a blind bend - i.e. stay on your own side of the road.