Well, this morning we explored the town of Dalat. Ryan really liked it. I thought it was cute...but wasn't blown away by the place. It is by far the cleanest town we have been in, and that's because it's a resort town. This is where all of the Vietnamese honeymooners come - 800,000 Vietnamese tourists a year. There is a beautiful lake with swan pedal boats, and some nice restaurants on the waterfront. Other than that though, I didn't find it that wonderful. Maybe I would see it differently if I were there with a girl, but there just didn't seem anything to DO there. We checked out the market, watching the ladies skin and butcher the fish live (standing there watching that is exactly how I picture my ideal honeymoon), and took our bikes around the town to check out some of the houses. A lot of the houses were HUGE - I imagine lots of people retire to Dalat?
I really wanted to go to a silk-making facility where you can see the mulberry trees being grown, the worms making their silk cocoons, the boiling of the cocoons, the making of the silk thread, and the weaving of
the scarves. We spent a solid hour trying to find the right road, but without a clear map, it was impossible. The maps of cities and provinces in my Lonely Planet are too fuzzy to read because it's a counterfeit copy.
We opted to get lunch instead, and then head off to the ocean. My meal was typical Vietnamese of chicken with ginger and lemongrass in a clay pot, but what was more interesting was the avocado shake I ordered. Who would think an avocado milkshake could be good? It was fantastic.
Following with the theme of poor navigation, Ryan and I had no clue how to get out of Dalat, nor which way we were supposed to go to head toward the ocean, other than just 'east'. I could faintly read on the map in my guide the name of a certain town, so after a half hour of searching, we finally found a sign pointing us toward our new destination. It happened that the town was on the way to the sea - lucky again.
When we stopped for gas, we noticed that the guys working the gas station had a pet monkey. We fed
it more bananas.
As we drove down through the highlands, I felt an insect land on my face. I had been hitting insects the whole trip, so this wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that that the insect landed on my lip, and proceeded to crawl down into my mouth, and sting me on the inside of my lower lip. Now, this was obviously very painful, and so Ryan and I stopped to check out the bee sting, and try to extract it. Luckily I had tweezers with me, and Ryan was able to extract the stinger, but the bee still did its damage. Over the next few hours, the left side of my lower lip proceeded to balloon up to the size of two grapes placed side by side. I didn't know skin was able to expand like that. When I closed my lips the balloon was too large to fit in my mouth, so I left it hang outside, like a giant growth. Ryan started telling the locals I had herpes. Luckily they didn't understand English. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that. Outside of Dalat, NOBODY spoke English, other than the girl with her schoolbook. Every time we ordered a meal we would point at whatever the guy next to us was eating...as long as it looked somewhat edible.
After the beesting, we made it another 100 yards before a thick fog settled in, and it began pouring rain. We stopped to throw on ponchos, and a couple of locals building a house really wanted me to take their photo. Their photo is posted.
Well, here I am in the pouring rain, soaking wet, my lip swollen to the size of two grapes, driving along a windy road praying that my back wheels don't slip out from under me. Luckily there wasn't a lot of traffic. We make it another 2 kilometers when we see a woman on the side of the road, hitchhiking. Ryan and I decide we should pick her up, and because I had two backpacks, she hops on the back of Ryan's bike. We drive and drive and drive, and the whole time she's yacking away, sitting on the back of Ryan's bike. I assume she speaks English, and the two of them are having some interesting conversation, but I later learn that she didn't speak a word of English, and was yacking away in Vietnamese. Didn't she understand Ryan didn't speak Vietnamese?
We drop by a road stand where ladies are selling sodas and snacks. I bought some 'peanuts in coconut juice', which were really peanuts in a coconut coating - wonderful. It turned out that a few of the ladies on the side of the road spoke English, so we asked them where the lady on the back of Ryan's bike was going. They told us she was headed to a town 30 kilometers east - exactly where we were headed....but that she really wanted to go with us to the beach! Hilarious. We ade sure she understood that she wasn't coming with us to the beach, and then headed off for her home town.
After that, the ride down from the highlands was quie uneventful. One long, wet, windy road, with beautiful scenery, but no adventures. Not until after we dropped her off. About 20 kilometers after we dropped the lady off, Ryan blew his back tire...in the middle of nowhere. We were actually in a town, which was lucky, as we had just been traveling through the desert (yes, there's a desert-like landscape in a part of lowland Vietnam), but this town wasn't much of a town. It just so happened that we blew the tire about 50 meters from a motorbike repair shop. It may sound like a big stroke of luck that we would happen to blow a tire right next to a motorbike shop....but you would be hard pressed to go 100 meters through a town in Vietnam WITHOUT seeing a motorbike repair shop.
However, we were in such a remote town that they didn't have the right inner tube for the bike, and a kid had to go fetch one. Well, he fetched the wrong one, so he went and got another, and then another. Finally, they had the right tube, but how to get the old tube off, and the new tube on? You would think replacing a motorbike tire inner tube would be a common thing at a motorbike repair shop, but apparently not. In the meantime, 15 people had shown up to throw in the two cents regarding how to fix the bike tire, and to see the Westerners that had recently arrived.
The owner of the bike repair shop took it upon himself to be our host, and he took us inside his house and began serving us rice wine stored in giant glass jars with pieces of something floating in it (bananas?). He said he fermented the rice wine himself (nobody spoke English). He and his buddy would drink a cup of the stuff, and then have Ryan and me drink a cup. The cups were much bigger, and the drink much stronger than the rice wine we were served two nights before. Uh oh.
He then brought out some sort of seed pod and showed us how to break open the pod and eat the orange goo surrounding the seeds. The goo was quite sour, and tasted like a black cherry 'Warhead' for those of you that remember that candy fad. I later learned that the fruit we were eating was tamarind. The sourness of the fruit actually went quite nicely with the strong taste of the alcohol, and I was having a blast drinking with the locals....although I had a headache from a long day of driving. I later learned that Ryan couldn't stand the taste of the rice wine, and also hated the tamarind. Haha.
By now it was quite late - at least two hours since we had arrived at the motorbike shop, and the 15 locals had managed to fix the bike (and disassemble half of it in the process). But by now Ryan and I definitely were not feeling up for riding our motorbikes in the dark to a town another 30 kilometers away, and then search for a guesthouse. So, our host offered for us to spend the night. Absolutely! At this point, all of the people working on the bike had joined the party, and we all snacked on sunflower seeds. I had bought a box of cashews at the grocery store in Bien Hoa, and contributed those to the party. Well, it wasn't quite a party. It really consisted of Ryan and me sitting in chairs across from our host and his friend, with his son and 14 of his buddies sitting on a cot staring at us, and the wives of our two hosts coming into the room every once in a while - all watching music videos on the television.
There wasn't too much conversation because of the language barrier, but they were convinced my swollen lip was from a punch to the mouth - they assumed Ryan and I had gotten into a fight. Every 20 minutes or so they would offer to take us to 'boom boom' (a brothel), but we declined. Good thing we opted out of that one, because later that night we we told (sign language) that the women in the brothel were all missing teeth. Oh god.
Ryan gave the host 100,000 dong (about $6) to go buy some beers. They come back with 12 660 ml bottles of the local brew. Whoa! That's a lot of beer. We went through 3 bottles of beer, as well as more rice wine (oh god), and they seemed upset when Ryan and I wouldn't tackle the remaining 9 bottles of beer! Every time we drank a shot of rice wine, our host would ask us to rate the wine on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the best. After every shot we were required to yell out "Number One!". That was the one English phrase they knew, presumably because it's also the name of a Vietnamese soft drink.
At this point my head was pounding. The alcohol wasn't helping, but I believed the headache to be a result of an uncomfortable helmet, breathing in toxic fumes all day long, and needing to concentrate so hard while biking. By 11:00 the visitors left to go back to their houses, so I hopped on the cot and passed out.
Vietnam's Flag
Map of Vietnam