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Published: December 22nd 2009
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Hey yall, time for another update from SE Asia.
Last week I'm sitting in the living room reading and hanging out when my house mate Jeff comes downstairs and suggested we go get a beer. We walked down the alley to our local beer/seafood/whatever stand and had some oysters and beer. After three or four 333's Jeffrey offhandedly says to me, "Hey you should come to Da Lat tonight with Anh Hieu and I." After speaking to Anh Hieu about travel arrangements, I was in.
That night we caught a bus heading out of HCMC at about 11:30. Da Lat is roughly 6 hours NE of HCMC, so we got in to town at about 6am.
A side note about bus travel in Vietnam: never watch what the driver is doing, it's terrifying.
Anyway, within 30 minutes of getting off the bus we had secured a hotel room and 3 motorbikes. The morning was cool, maybe 15 or 16 degrees Celsius, which felt very strange after being perpetually warm/hot in HCMC. It was the first time I wore a hooded sweatshirt in almost four months. Also the change in air quality was striking, I must have spent 10 minutes standing on our hotel balcony just breathing.
After watching the sun rise up over the mountains and the city, we got on our motorbikes and blasted out of town. The countryside around Da Lat was paradoxically familiar. The feel in the surrounding area was strikingly reminiscent of parts of West Virginia, western North Carolina and Virginia. Beautiful views of mountains (like the Appalachians probably were before they got rounded off by erosion), farms, homesteads, country stores, and one-intersection villages. Contrasting smells of freshly upturned soil, animal waste, flowers, cooking food--all vying for attention. I remember turning to Jeff as we waited at one intersection and saying, "Smells like home."
About 20 minutes outside the city is a national park. For about $3 per person you can take an old Russian 4x4 to the top of a mountain. So Jeff, Anh Hieu, myself, and a young Vietnamese couple all piled in and the driver took off. The trip up the mountain would have made a fantastic rally special stage: beautiful views, blind hairpin corners, huge drop offs. Jeff and I talked of the logistics of having a Rally Da Lat as we ascended. At the top, we got out and were welcomed by a ridiculously gorgeous view of the surrounding area. In the distance you could see the whole city, draped over the mountains like a cloth. Closer you could see the road we traveled out of the city on and a lake/stream called the Golden River/Lake (named because in the right lighting it does have a gold tint). At the top was a small lodge where we ate kebabs of rabbit, beef, chicken, and pork and drank a cup of coffee and a Heineken. Words do not do the view from this mountain justice, and I wish Jeff would have dumped the pictures we took onto my laptop before he went back home to Canada for Christmas and whatnot, I'll hopefully have those up soon. We aren't professional photographers but I'll be damned if we didn't get some National Geographic quality shots. We caught another 4x4 back down and went on a hunt to find the Golden River.
You can say what you want about the quality of the road construction in Vietnam, there aren't many roads I can think of that are more beautiful than the ones we rode on in Da Lat. Roads that wrap themselves up and down the mountains, past humble farms and through clusters of homes. Roads that snake along next to rivers and flash through bits of forest only to bring you back to the panoramic views of the mountains.
After cruising along for a bit we found ourselves at the main section of the Golden River/Lake. Following the direction of a woman sitting at the side of the road, we followed a path down onto a small peninsula. There we found a makeshift cafe that served coffee and beer and offered us a view over the lake and the mountain we had been on earlier. We ordered three 333's and collapsed into hammocks. Without even realizing it we all passed out for about 45 minutes. Upon waking, I stretched and stood up. Jeff and Anh Hieu were still asleep (Anh Hieu was snoring like a chainsaw) and Jeff's $2000 camera was still beside him, so all was well. Not wanting to wake them up yet I grabbed a chair and sat down facing the lake. The stillness of that moment was infinitely excellent after four months of being in the pinball machine that is HCMC.
We headed back into town to check out the Da Lat market. The layout of the city is somewhat hard to grasp because of the changes in elevation. In my mind I broke it down into three areas: the mountain side neighborhoods, the valley, and the lake. Our hotel and the neighborhood that we were in was built into the side of one of the mountains. The valley, or the lowest part of the city consists of the Da Lat market which then bleeds into the lake and the areas around there. That's not the best description but it's all I could cobble together in the short time I was there.
The Da Lat market is a cornucopia: spices, nuts, fruit (both fresh and dried), meat, live fish, clothing, toys, crafts, coffee, tea, herbs, and a million other things we didn't have time to check out. Wandering through the stalls was bewildering-- so many smells, so many sounds, so many offers to try this or that. Jeff and I were more in a "hey-let's-check-this-place-out" mood than a shopping mood, but we still ended up buying a half-kilo of Da Lat cashews (oh my god they are good). My favorite moment was watching a group of 6 Vietnamese people crowded around a fish stall, giving advice to the man cutting fillets and bidding on the best pieces.
After the market and a light lunch we took off through the other side of the city towards a local winery where Anh Hieu had organized a tour by the owner. By this point I fully understood why Da Lat is a huge vacation spot, the city is simply gorgeous. Hopefully the pictures we took will illustrate this fact far better than I can.
There is no way for me to get all this trip described in the space that travel blog provides, so we'll call this part 1. Today I have to get stuff together because I'm going to Seoul tomorrow for Christmas. When I get back I'll relate the second half of the day which involved a wine tour, waterfalls, dynamite, Anh Hieu's house in the mountains, an old man getting tazered, and dinner on the lake.
Love to you all,
Spencer
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