Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City

Sunday, March 31st 2013, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam
Yesterday morning we checked out of our hotel in Dalat and were at the Sinh Tourist office just down the street in plenty of time to catch our air-conditioned bus. As soon as we left Dalat, we descended down a curving mountain road for quite a drop until we reached another plateau. We traveled south through farmland for a long way until we descended again closer to sea level.

The bus trip took 8 1/2 hours including 3 short rest stops. It all went pretty well. The last hour was spent driving into the city so that was slow. However, getting here only 1/2 hour past the promised arrival time was quite good. It was only a 5 minute walk from the Sinh Tourist office around the corner to our hotel, the Elios on Pham Ngu Lao Street.
The hotel is quite nice. We have a room with no window but the AC is good and it has a tub instead of just a shower so that's a step up. Plus the breakfast buffet on the 12th floor is quite extensive and tasty. The only downside to breakfast this morning was being near some Chinese tourists who were incredibly loud. They shouted at each other across the large dining area, like there was no-one else there. We're hoping their bus left today.
Dylan had a university exam yesterday afternoon while we were on the bus. But last night, he and Kasumi came to our hotel for happy hour. It was great to see them. After celebrating with wine in our room, we all went back to Nha Hang Ngon, where we'd been a few times in January. The dining area is ringed with food stations all making a different dish, like street food vendors except in nicer surroundings. Once again, we enjoyed it. We actually managed to stay out until 10 pm, but were really tired when we finally got home.

 Looking down in one direction from our 12th floor breakfast restaurant terrace, we could see the park between Pham Ngu Lao Street and Le Loi Street.

 Lots of people make use of these parks for exercise and relaxation, as well as to just get out of small apartments housing extended families.

That's downtown District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. There are quite a few trees here which always helps make the difference between a livable city and one that's not so good.
After breakfast we walked around the corner to Nam Silk, where I had bought my suit in January. Anita's silk sarong that her friend Karen had purchased for her in Thailand about 20 years ago is finally wearing out so she wanted to buy a replacement. It has been an extremely useful gift. She chose 2 silk patterns and used the old one to get the correct size. For 300,000 dong ($15) Anita had 2 new sarongs made and they were ready within 2 hours.
Dylan and Kasumi came over and we all went down near the main post office and the big cathedral in District 1 for the afternoon. We ate lunch at a great sushi restaurant and then wandered around a bit.

 The cathedral looks very French, which is not a surprise.

 Tourist pose.

Tourist pose in the other direction, toward the Metropole building where Dylan works at the Canadian Consulate.
It must be at least 35C today so we didn't last long out in the blazing hot sun. We walked around behind the Opera House to an outdoor coffee shop with fans over the tables and just relaxed there for awhile. It's been great to catch up with Dylan and Kasumi and to share some of our travel tales in person. Now that we've come full circle on this trip, we're realizing just how many experiences we've had. We've seen a lot and have hopefully absorbed some of it so that we're not quite the same people we were when we arrived here New Year's Eve. Travel is supposed to broaden your outlook, after all.
Then we caught a cab back up to Pham Ngu Lao to pick up Anita's sarongs.
Dylan and Kasumi have gone home for a shower and we're here doing the same. In another hour or so, when it's cooler, we'll all go out for dinner.

Dalat Crazy House and Bao Dai Palace

Friday, March 29th, 2013 Dalat Vietnam

Last night we couldn't resist going back to Lien Hoa for dinner. It's frequented by many Vietnamese families and serves excellent Vietnamese food. The food in the picture cost 170,000 dong ($8.50), including a big carafe of green tea. We were stuffed once again. There's also always bananas on the table if you want more or need to soothe your palate.

 This morning after another good breakfast in our hotel, we walked about 1/2 an hour to the southeast of town to the "Crazy House" as the locals call it.It's actually a hotel where there are rooms for rent but it's so bizarre that it's become quite a tourist attraction. It's built mostly from concrete on wire mesh and rebar cages that are bent into weird shapes.

 It's very strange, with narrow passages and rooms all over the place.

 It's hard to get a picture that tells what it's really like.

Stairways and passages curve around in all different directions.

 I'm usually pretty steady on my feet (at least I used to be) but all of these weird curves and climbs get a bit dis-orienting, especially about 40 feet in the air with a little knee-high railing.

 I was feeling a little shaky getting down off this bridge between sections. It doesn't show in the picture because it was taken from an adjacent terrace but it was a long way to the ground from the bridge. I was happy to get off of there. This place would never be open to the public in Canada. Sooner or later someone is going to fall.

 Same same only at ground level.

Odd shapes all over.

This is one of the suites with the bed in the background on the left. They're all different.

 Anita is scaring the crocodiles again. Other than that, our visit was without mishap, except that the urinal in the men's washroom had a break in the drain line. Sometimes here you might as well just urinate on your own feet without the middle step of using a urinal. Luckily there was a big pail of clean water nearby for a footbath.

Back out on the street we walked by another typical example of how the telephone lines droop a little low sometimes. Asian alertness tests are not only at ground level. Lots of wires and signs are at head level.

 Although we were getting off our map, we knew that one of the summer palaces of Bao Dai, the last king of the Nguyen Dynasty, was somewhere up the road. Eventually we found it on a pine forested hill top. It was built from 1933 to 1938. Designed by a French architect, it must have been the latest in style.

 At the entrance we had to put little sock things over our shoes to keep the floors clean, although the whole place was really a bit beat up. It hadn't been used since the king got the boot for good in 1954. All the furnishings were left as they were.

The furnishings might seem a little tacky these days.

 The first queen who died young from cancer, had this "sauna machine" in her private area. It reminded Anita of the machine she was forced to use at the chiropractor's office when she was a child.

The king's bed wasn't really that regal.

Bao Dai was a great admirer of French gardens so he had a small one created here.

 When we first went in the palace, this young man told us he was a university student, working as an intern here giving free tours to practice his English. He asked if he could show us around so we said okay. He was very helpful and didn't want any money from us. We gave him 100,000 dong ($5) anyway to help him with his studies. Plus we corrected some of his pronunciation. And he taught us that to say "Nguyen Dynasty" you should actually say "wing dynasty". No matter how much trouble these students have pronouncing English, they do very well compared to us trying to speak Vietnamese.

On the way home, we tried to take a more direct route. However we couldn't see that there was a whole other valley that we had to descend into before getting over the hill near the lake in Dalat. At one point the road diminished into a gravel footpath between houses then started getting better again as we climbed up the other side. There are whole neighbourhoods built along motorcycle roads like the one in the picture. They don't get many tourists.
Eventually, we found our way back to the center of town and to our hotel. Although the weather was warm and sunny this morning, it's started to thunderstorm again today as it did yesterday afternoon. It will probably stop in time for us to go back into the center for dinner. Tomorrow morning we leave on an 8 hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City to visit Dylan again before we go home.
Since the first leg of our flight home takes us to Seoul, we're hoping that the tension between North Korea and the US is just the usual rhetoric and not a serious escalation into bombing. We're very likely okay, although Anita remains a bit dubious.

Dalat

Thursday, March 28th, 2013 Dalat Vietnam

 This morning we had breakfast at our hotel. The woman who runs it is very attentive to the guests and very curt with the staff. However, it's a great breakfast with really good pho, spring rolls, omelettes and lots of other stuff. Pho (rice noodle soup) is like granola for breakfast here.
Our first destination was the Catholic church around the tip of the lake. Anita is planning to go to the Good Friday service and we had to check the times. It looks like 5:15 am or 5:15 pm. Hmmm, I wonder which one she'll choose.
Dalat is a former French colonial hill town, where French people working in Saigon came to escape the heat. They also administered coffee and tea plantations here. Thus, there is a Catholic church. It's not all that common but they are scattered all over Vietnam.

 It's a 7 km walk around the lake. All the way around there is a good walkway and a thin strip of parkland. This lake was created in the early 1900s by damming up a stream that runs through the valley.

About 2/3 of the way around the lake, we stopped at the Dalat Flower Garden. The entrance arch is made of hundreds of potted plants. This is a common technique here to create huge arches or floral signs.

It cost only 20,000 dong ($1) each to get in but that's double what it says in Lonely Planet. Again, the latest version of Lonely Planet is out of date. The garden, however, is beautiful. The weather today is a mix of sun and cloud and about 25C. It's the end of summer here so it's supposedly quite dry. The annual flower festival is at the beginning of January but the flowers looked awfully nice to us even this late in the dry season. There are large sculpted bushes, fountains and flowers growing all around. Anita is pouring tea (actually there's a water fountain behind).

We walked along a path and looked down on some of the gardens.

 There are a couple of huge greenhouses with lots more flowers inside.

 Sculpting bushes is very common here. That's great for the idiot tourist pose.

 Idiot tourist pose avec uneaten vegetable chien.

One greenhouse is full of roses, although they're a little past their prime.

 Great colours!

 Anita is posing with a pyramid of her favourite Vietnamese treasures.

That's right, it's a pyramid of all the bottles of wine she drank on this trip. Actually, Dalat wine is made here and it's really cheap at the convenience stores in town. The regular stuff is 60,000 dong ($3) and an upgraded bottle that Anita bought today cost her 76,000 dong ($3.80). Outrageous upcharge, we may go broke.

The Flower Garden was a nice place to spend a couple of hours this morning.

Finally, we walked back along the lake and up to our hotel. It looks like it may thunderstorm but in a couple of hours we'll go back up to the main part of town for dinner. Yesterday, we picked out a couple more restaurants that are close to each other so we'll walk up there later. We're going to miss the fantastic food in southeast Asia when we get home.

Nha Trang to Dalat

Wednesday, March 27th 2013 Dalat Vietnam

 Our bus left Nha Trang this morning at 8 am and traveled west and south away from the ocean and towards the central highlands. On the way, we could see rice being harvested and the grain was being dried on the roads and on the paved shoulder of the highway. Traffic cops in Canada would go nuts.

 Our first stop was a break at a small roadside restaurant by this little river. It was hot and sunny there, even at 9:30 am. From then on our bus slowly crawled up steep switchbacks to get up onto the highlands. Dalat is about 1,500 m above sea level.

 We stopped at a lookout point to take a look back down the valley that we'd climbed up.

While we were enjoying the view, a rock behind the back wheel of our bus was preventing it from rolling backward down the road. That's a lot of bus for one little rock. The driver stalled the bus twice when we departed because the grade was quite steep. Once we got going, the bus helper threw the rock off the road and ran to catch up and jump in the open door.

 In the highlands, there are lots of open pine forests, similar to some at home.

As we rounded a curve on one hill, we could se a fuel truck that had overturned quite recently. Diesel fuel was running down the ditch and on the road. The fumes were intense.

 Fuel is expensive here. Local people passing by all stopped and filled up whatever containers they had with diesel fuel.

Our driver stopped the bus and he and the helper ran back with buckets to get fuel.The helper (in the green shirt) fashioned a funnel out of a bigger water bottle and they spent half an hour gathering fuel and pouring it into the bus tank. Fuel was spilling all over and running across the road by the time they were done.
At first, some of the tourists (Chinese, Russian and Aussie, mostly) were taking pictures right by the bus. Then most of us moved further up the road just in case there was a fire. Diesel fuel isn't explosive like gasoline but the whole affair had a lot of people worried. Plus, none of the Vietnamese people bothered to send someone further up the curve to warn drivers to slow down. Eventually, we tourists did that. After half an hour, people were getting really annoyed by the delay and the danger of fire or getting hit by another vehicle. Eventually, our bus left but the driver and helper stunk of all the fuel that they had spilled on themselves. Luckily we were only 1/2 an hour from Dalat and arrived in one piece but many people, including us, complained at the office about the stupidity of stopping a bus full of people at a fuel spill on a steep curving mountain road. The driver saw that we were annoyed and said he was sorry. Just another day in Vietnam.

That's diesel fuel running from our bus and across the road.

On the outskirts of Dalat, we passed thousands of greenhouses all packed in on every flat spot. They grow lots of strawberries, flowers, vegetables and maybe tea here.
We found our hotel just up the street from the Sinh Tourist office. The hotel is fine. The rooms are old-fashioned, like a Chateau Laurier or something similar but very nice. We ate western food at V Cafe just down the street because we were really hungry. Then after a walk around town we found Lien Hoa, a good Vietnamese restaurant and bakery, so we ate again and bought some chocolate croissants. It's a bit rainy here and much cooler than the coast (maybe around 22C). So far, in this cloudy weather, Dalat doesn't look that impressive but perhaps tomorrow we'll find out differently.