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.
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