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Published: October 3rd 2010
Phoun Trung office Dalat
Tickets booked, we're ready for the offWe continue to travel with Sara and Scott which translates as, our journey remains filled with laughter. We agree that we are all prone to being lazy tourists, by which we mean that we are more than happy with good company and a beer and that site seeing has become somewhat optional. We could try to blame this on the increasing presence of the Monsoon rains or, indeed, Gregg’s ear infection but either might be stretching the truth a little.
29 September 2010
Dreams Hotel is a place that, for once, lives up to its own hype. The staff (a family) are incredibly helpful and welcoming and they run their hotel in such a way that you really feel as if it is a home from home. Breakfast is taken in the basement around a massive table which gives a great opportunity to meet fellow travellers and exchange stories, information and advice. The breakfast spread is also one of the best that we have seen since arriving in Vietnam (there is even, for those who like it, Marmite & Vegemite) giving me the rare opportunity to gorge on dragon fruit, passion fruit, mango and various types of melon.
Welcome
to Crazy House This morning, breakfast was hampered only by Gregg’s still ‘blocked’ ear which meant that he missed out on a good half of the conversation. We were a little tardy and therefore missed Sara & Scott but, instead, enjoyed conversation with others. On returning to our room, we set about making a plan for the day which quickly became a visit to the “Crazy House”. This is an ongoing project belonging to the Architect daughter of Ho Chi Minh’s successor which mixes Gaudi-esque bizarre with a hint of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland all fashioned of multicoloured concrete. It is impossible to give any greater an explanation than that so I will simply allow the photos to speak for themselves.
Having found Scott & Sara in the lobby as we were leaving the hotel, the four of us then decided that we would head on to Bao Dai’s Summer Palace which was a short walk away. On the way there , we passed the Pasteur Institute of immunology, disease etc at which a loud bell was ringing. No one seemed to be exiting the building at pace and I therefore deduce that his was more likely to be a call to lunch
or back to work than a fire alarm.
My memory tells me that it was unusually quiet there but there might be a touch of poetic licence in that statement, the reason for which is the presence of a sign unlike any other we have seen in Vietnam - a “No Horns” sign. My rose tinted spectacles, at least, whisper that the sign was universally acknowledged but our month’s journey through Vietnam tells me that it probably wasn’t. Whichever is the case, we all captured digital evidence of said sign for posterity.
If the “Crazy House” lived up to its name, Bao Dai’s Summer Palace took craziness to an entirely new galaxy. At the entrance, we were given bags to wear over our shoes, giving the impression that the mansion would be filled with a lifetime’s priceless artefacts. Imagine Miami Beach patrol HQ crossed with a 1970’s leisure centre and sparsely populated by yellow G-Plan furniture. Now add a few smatterings of debris, a recently used bar of soap next to the kitchen sink and a solitary pot noodle in the cupboard and you might be getting somewhere close to understanding why we couldn’t stop giggling and immediately
One noisy frog
at Crazy House feeling like naughty school children for doing so. It is yellow, very yellow and the presentation can only be described as dirty yet clinical, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction. The rooms are identified only by their purpose and it is impossible to obtain any feeling for how this property was used or the personalities of those that inhabited it.
Having had our fill of tourist ‘attractions‘, we headed back in to town and spent a small age looking for the Lotus Café referred to in our guidebook before giving up and returning to the place that we had eaten a couple of nights previously. Due to the red wine incident, the staff remembered us and were, again, extremely apologetic.
Jaded by the craziness, we returned to Dreams for two purposes. The first was to arrange a room for the following night in Saigon and the second, and most important, was for our last opportunity to use the Jacuzzi, steam room & sauna. I know that you must be wondering exactly how we can call ourselves backpackers when delighting in such luxury but this is honestly a budget hotel (check out the Lonely Planet if you
don't believe me) and it is simply one hell of a good buy.
We have concluded that there are, broadly speaking, three types of backpacker:
1. Gap year students;
2. Career breakers (usually having a last hurrah before settling down in one way or another); and
3. Those on an annual holiday who just happen to prefer to do so accompanied by a back pack rather than a suitcase.
You don't find many category 1's in the type of places that we are staying in but there are plenty of 2's and 3's. Convenient then, that we are also a 2.
After a glass of wine or two, great food at the Art Cafe and much gaiety, we all returned to pack and get a relatively early night's sleep in preparation for yet another early morning pick up. For the first time we were not sleeping in fear of what the next day's travel would bring because we had been able to book our trip directly at the bus company's office (if there are public bus stations here, we have never been collected from or delivered to one) ourselves during the day. I guess that our
Spiders Web
at crazy house only concerns were what 8 hours of a bus would feel like and how kamikaze the driver would be.
30 September 2010
We all assembled at the breakfast table before 6:30am and later re-assembled in reception to await our minibus to the bus. To our surprise, the minibus arrived at the exact time that we had been told it would and the four of us, plus a German couple that we bump in to with unbelievable regularity, took our first mode of transport for the day.
There are so many buses that go from Dalat to Saigon everyday and we were so punctual in our arrival at the company office that we could have caught the earlier bus had we been booked on it - a pretty good start in our book.
The journey was a long one but not unbearably so and as we wound down from Dalat we passed through an ever changing physical and human landscape until we reached our final destination. You see, Vietnamese daily life is played out on pavements or in open fronted shops and homes and it is therefore possible to observe a great deal of it - even
from a bus. Crops dry on the side of the road, roosters roam free and parents and children alike lounge on motorbikes just watching the world go by.
The nature of the crops changed along with our reducing altitude. Gone were the strawberries, cauliflower and blooms to be replaced by coffee beans and rubber plantations. The rubber plantations were one of the most regimented sights that we have witnessed in Vietnam with uniform trees planted perfectly in line and each adorned with a small cup to collect the sap placed at exactly the same height on each tree.
Then, with no warning whatsoever, we were in Saigon. Saying that makes it sound as if we happened upon a little market town in the middle of nowhere and found ourselves suddenly at our final destination. Not so. Saigon (only called Ho Chi Minh City for official purposes) is a big, big place. I hesitate to make a comparison because, in truth, we have seen so little of it but it must be easily as big as London in its sprawl. Unlike London however, entrance to Saigon’s inner sanctum is not via neatly lined suburban streets. Chaos meets chaos and
A little nook at Crazy House
Notice the sticky outy right ear and the slight yellow tinge - at this time he was still suffering poor little chap. chaos again. It took nearly two hours for the bus to negotiate its way to the company office amid the melee of “me first” traffic. There is no priority at roundabouts (in fact you are lucky if you realise that you are even on one) and traffic quite literally weaves and hoots its way across major junctions with, apparently, little regard for traffic lights. You really do need to see it to believe it.
Needless to say, our driver successfully delivered us and we found our way to our new hotel.
We booked a trip to Cu Chi tunnels for tomorrow and then headed out for dinner which descended in to one too many cocktails and not quite as early a night as any of us had intended.
Our preliminary view is that we all, rather unexpectedly, like Saigon. The roads are wider than those in Hanoi and that hoodwinks you in to feeling that it isn’t quite so frenetic. Mercifully, the pavements are not quite so comprehensively consumed by vendors products or parked mopeds here and even the touts seem a little more bearable - I wonder whether it will continue that way.
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Chris
non-member comment
Great Place
Thanks again for the memories, I can't wait to return in March. Dreams is awesome isn't it. Did you try the cable car in Dalat? Happy travels.