Bãi biển An Bàng

An Bang is a few kilometres north-east of Hoi An, on the central Vietnamese coast. It is a straight open beach facing the South China Sea, and it exists in its current form largely because the beach immediately south of it does not.

Cua Dai was Hoi An's beach for decades. From around 2004 it began eroding severely — a combination of upstream dams reducing sediment, sand mining, and hard structures built to defend hotels that redirected the problem along the coast — and by the mid-2010s much of it had gone, with hotels sandbagged and closed. An Bang absorbed the visitors, and the erosion has since been working its way north. Sea walls, geotextile barriers and offshore breakwaters have all been tried here, and the coast is a live case study in coastal engineering that is taught as one.

What is there is a wide golden beach with real surf, a shore break and rip currents; swimming is patrolled in season and the flags are enforced. The water is warm from spring to autumn and the sea is rough from October, when typhoons reach this coast.

Development is a line of beach bars and restaurants, low and informal, with the road behind and rice fields between here and the old town. Hoi An itself, a World Heritage merchant town, is fifteen minutes by bicycle and is why almost everyone is here. Cua Dai's remains are a twenty-minute walk south and are worth seeing: sandbags, closed hotels and a sea wall where a beach used to be. It is the clearest illustration of what this coastline is losing.

Cua Dai, twenty minutes south, is sandbags and closed hotels where a beach used to be. An Bang has the visitors now and is losing ground in the same way, defended by sea walls and geotextile tubes that have been tried in sequence. Swim inside the flags, cycle in from the old town through the rice, and go and look at the other beach while it is still legible.