We said our sad goodbyes to Hoi An and climbed in to the Taxi back north to Da Nang to catch our flight to Nha Trang. We were scheduled to depart at 6:10pm and I for one was rather excited at the prospect of flying along the Vietnamese coast at sunset, especially once we had checked in and I had been allocated a window seat. Sadly, it wasn’t to be though as a late arrival meant we were delayed for about an hour. Ah well. We arrived in to Nha Trang and set off for our hotel, a large and spacious if slightly dated 2nd story room with a huge balcony overlooking a busy street corner. It was now about 10pm so after a quick fashion shoot with our newly tailored wardrobe we called it a night.
There isn’t really much to do in Nha Trang; the city has a pretty decent beach and a massively overpriced theme park… and that’s about it. It’ only real feature of note is that it’s crawling with Russian holiday makers and expats, so much so in fact that Russian, rather than English, is the second language here. The popularity of Nha Trang with the Russians is a hangover from a period between 1975 and 2002 when the nearby natural harbour of Cam Ranh was leased to the USSR and later to Russia as a Naval base.
We didn’t really take to Nha Trang, it’s little more than a watered down version of Da Nang, albeit watered down with Vodka. Given the number of high-rise hotels and apartment complexes being constructed though, it will likely soon be giving Da Nang a run for its money. If you’re a fan of days on the beach and nights in the club all whilst ‘vanity-‘graming’ every 5minutes and doing everything you can to avoid interacting with the local culture, then Nha Trang is the city for you! That’s not really us though, so for much of the next two days we enjoyed the balcony and the cool sea breeze that swept across it whilst we gave our surplus a chance to heal itself.
Onwards then to Da Lat, a town which we already knew was going to being launching a full frontal assault on our finances. We set off from Nha Trang for the 4 hour drive to Da Lat in the back of a minivan whose suspension had been removed and replaced with cinder blocks and whose driver had clearly learned been trained by the Peruvians (that or his brain had also been removed and replaced with a cinder block). How we’ve managed to survive all of this insane driving so far this year is beyond me, but it has had the unintended side effect of helping Katy get over her fear of flying. She’s positively zen now when strapped into an aircraft seat rather than in a bus and holding on to the back of the seat in front whilst being thrown through another blind overtake.
Although shaken by our drive through the mountains we arrived at Da Lat and were instantly bowled over by the refreshingly cool air temperature. Da Lat lies at an altitude of just over 1500m, deep inside the mountains of the central highlands and at this time of year typically has temperatures in the high teens to mid-twenties. After 2 months of not stop 30+ degree heat, this was absolute heaven! Being cold has never felt so novel. A short taxi ride brought us to Tree House hostel, run by an English guy named Simon and his Vietnamese wife Hannah, which would be our home for the next 4 nights. That evening we enjoyed a ‘family dinner ‘which the hostel puts on on alternative nights for a small extra fee. The word ‘family’ is used slightly loosely here in so far as Hannah stays in the kitchen wither sister and cooks dish after dish of stunning Vietnamese cuisine, whilst Simon sits at the dining table with the guests getting steadily more drunk. It’s good to see that he has acclimatised so well to gender norms in his adopted country.
Over dinner we got chatting to fellow guests Esther and Richard from London who, like us, were a little older than the run-of-the-mill backpacker here and so shared our curmudgeonly disdain for loud, vacuous party-loving youths. People after our own heart. Before we knew it three hours had passed as food kept coming and beer and rice wine kept flowing until eventually Esther, Richard and ourselves felt the pull of our beds. The family dinner was such a nice change of pace from the usual hostel experience; travelling in the internet age means that striking up a conversation with other hotel or hostel guests is a rare thing and so it can sometimes be a quite insular experience. We’d almost forgotten how nice it can be to actually talk to other people.
We set off early the next morning to explore Da Lat following a self-guided walking tour that Katy had found online. The city was built by the French as a mountain retreat in the late 19th century and grew quickly over the following half century as the French began producing wine and coffee on the slopes of the surrounding mountains. The city survived the war largely unscathed and today is the most popular domestic tourist destination for the Vietnamese. The city’s French origins are still readily visible; the wide boulevards are lined with trees; the hotels have that classic Parisian feel with neo-classical recessed columns and balconies and everywhere there are small parks and gardens, churches and bistro cafes. The city is centred around a large artificial lake which is circumnavigated by a wide, pine tree lined road. With the mountains in the background and the cool greens of the foliage, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a small French or Swiss town somewhere in the Prealps.
The first stop on our little jaunt was Hang Nga Guesthouse, known informally as ‘the crazy house’. The guesthouse is an ever-expanding and highly unconventional freeform building designed by Vietnamese architect Dang Viet Nga. She started the construction in 1990 and has been expanding it ever since despite the efforts of the local authorities to shut her down (that was, until they realised that it was a draw for tourists and there was money to be made). Even today whole new sections are being added. Although started as a guesthouse, the site attracts so much attention that during the day the grounds are open for the public to explore for a small fee. The guesthouse features four main buildings; one themed on an anthill, one a greatly exaggerated mediaeval town-house, one as a coral reef and one that defies all explanation. All four buildings are intertwined by concrete pathways and ladders, each decorated to look like vines or rock formations or other more abstract organic forms. The site is a real warren and its location on a hill on the outskirts of the city means that from the top (if you could fine your way there) you can get some great vistas over Da Lat. We spent a good hour and a half climbing around through caverns and seashells, over rooves and across pathways having a great time getting completely disorientated. The attention to detail here is impressive and it would be a brilliant place to dump kids for a few hours and let them annoy someone else for a change.
Once we had had our fill we stopped in the small café attached to the crazy house and enjoyed the fact that, for the first time in months, we were out and about in Asia and not sweating our own bodyweight in water every 20 minutes. We slurped down a banana smoothie each and carried on our adventure, passing a church which famously has a chicken on the roof (ok) before heading down to a large, elevated park overlooking the lake which is home to a pair of imposing glass and metal structures; one shaped like an artichoke and another representing the head of a sunflower. Along with Wine and Coffee, Da Lat is also renowned for its flower production and the sunflower head is a celebration of that. The countryside around the city is dominated by polythene greenhouses which produce all manner of cut flowers, many of which are used liberally to decorate the public parks and gardens in the city. Because of its flower trade, Da Lat is a popular palace for young couples to come to take their wedding photos which, in local custom, are taken before the wedding. Evidently the Vietnamese have no equivalent concept to ‘jinxing’.
We carried on past the lake and up a steady hill to the train station. Da Lat is no longer on the main railway line, the tracks that used to connect it to Phan Rang were taken up after the war and used to construct the reunification line further north. The only remaining tracks are a short section leading from the station to a pagoda about 5km southeast of the city and to which a small tourist train runs twice daily. We had been told by fellow travellers at Tree House Hostel that it was a bit of a waste of time though, as the train is overcrowded with throngs of Chinese tour groups madly trying to take photos of themselves in front of every window, and that the pagoda is a bit of a tourist trap. We opted instead just to enjoy the grounds of the station; a 1930’s French Art Deco style building which has been lovingly maintained by local volunteers.
On our way back into town we stopped off for a light lunch in a café that makes home-made ice cream where Katy found she had a taste for durian, and I questioned why I agreed to marry her. After that we walked around the rest of the lake swearing at the local drivers who have a penchant for fitting customised horns to their vehicles that sound like shotguns being fired through church organs. We walked to Da Lat’s famous flower garden. And then past Da Lats famous flower garden. Because it’s a flower garden, and headed back home. Having walked about 12 miles in all around the city we felt we had burned enough calories to have a burger for dinner, so that’s what we did.
The following morning, we had booked ourselves on to a day-long guided sightseeing tour recommended by Simon & Hannah. About 9am our guide arrived, and we piled in to the 4×4 joining a pair of Dutch guys and a young Canadian called Adelle who had already been picked up from another hostel. We set off and quickly got chatting amongst ourselves as we made our way out of the city towards our first stop up by a small dam just to the south of city. Here our tour guide Cong told us about Ho Tuyen lake, the reservoir held back by dam which provides flood protection to Da Lat, as well as talking us through the itinerary for the day. Cong was informative, friendly and witty with an extremely dry and sarcastic sense of humour. He spoke great English and quickly built a rapport with us by mocking our accents and swearing at other Vietnamese drivers using rather choice words that Grandma would most certainly not approve of. Cong was also very open to talking about Vietnams society and politics, spilling all sorts of dark secrets about corruption and exploitation and the shortcomings of essential services. This was my favourite part of the tour and I really appreciated Congs willingness to tackle difficult subjects and answer probing questions. There are days, when travelling, when you say to yourself that no matter what problems your home country faces, things could be a lot worse. This was one of those days.
If all we’d done was drive around the Vietnamese countryside talking about corrupt institutions, the legacy of the War, social divisions and people’s attitude to propaganda, then this day would have been good value for money. It wasn’t though, and Cong had loads of stops for us to enjoy including a couple of waterfalls, a coffee plantation where we got to sample coffee farmed by weasels (if you’re now thinking about that story you vaguely remember about coffee made from weasel poop, yes, that’s the one), a mushroom farm, a massive statue of a female buddha (paid for with misappropriated funds according to Cong), a secluded golf resort for the Vietnamese elite, a cricket farm where we got to try freshly made rice wine and deep fried crickets (yum) and finally a flower plantation.
It was a packed and absolutely fascinating day and to cap it all off there was another family dinner back at the hostel that evening. We had intended to get a fairly early night as we had plans for the following morning but after 4 beers and too much rice wine, we found ourselves mixing it with the best of them over a game of cards against humanity. Best laid plans and all…
Considerably later than planned the following morning we set off to Da Lat cable car station for the short ride through the pine trees to Tuc Lam Phung Hoang Zen Monastery. We weren’t here for enlightenment just yet though; we had another agenda! About a 15 minute walk from the cable car station is Datanla Waterfalls which can either be accessed by a steep mountain path, or via an alpine bobsled roller coaster. No prizes for guessing which option we took!
An alpine coaster is a little different to a traditional roller coaster. Instead of a large train which seats 20-30 people each car is small and seats 1 or 2 people and is fitted with a manual brake for speed control. The geography also means that you start at the top rather than at the bottom, only going up the chain lift on the return trip to the station. Katy and I engaged in our greatest national pursuit and dutifully joined the queue whilst scowling at anyone who even looked like they were thinking of jumping the line. A short wait later it was our turn to board and Katy lead the way as we took separate cars. The trains quickly pick up speed coming out of the station and soon we were whizzing through the trees and flying through banked corners as fast as we dared. The ride was surprisingly smooth and really good fun and was the perfect cure for our hangovers. Sadly, it was all over too quickly and after being winched up a short hill we were made to depart at the second station and were presented an opportunity to buy some on ride photos. ‘Well it’s not like we’re ever going to be here again’ is a phrase we see to be saying with worrying frequency as we open our wallets at the moment.
At the bottom is a vantage point for Datanla waterfalls, which are perfectly pleasant, though not as impressive as the waterfalls we had seen the previous day and was absolutely swarming with those in pursuit of nirvana through the medium of the perfect selfie. We got back on the roller coaster for the shorter second section which mainly consisted of chain lifts taking us to the top of the hill. We walked back and I took a brief look around the Zen Monastery whilst Katy tried to shake off the lingering effects of her hangover and then we headed back on to the cable car and returned to the city. Our next stop was the market which we had hoped would yield some interesting wares but proved to be a bit repetitive and something of an anti-climax to our time in Da Lat, a city which had proven to be a real favourite of our time in Asia.
Luckily that evening there was no family dinner taking place, which was good, because the following morning we had to get up at 5am to catch a flight to Sai Gon and if there had been a family dinner, we certainly wouldn’t have packed and probably would have overslept.
But more on that next time.
Katy and Dave Avoid Adulthood 