Dalat Ain’t All That
Sunday, 4th December, Phuong Tran Hotel, Dalat
Well we’ve finally experienced our first disappointment in a place. After an eight hour bus drive up to the mountains (although we did cop out a little and go in a luxury coach, so we had heaps of leg room), we arrived in Dalat, the city that the Lonely Planet guide describes as ideal for “honeymooners and kitsch-lovers,” and being surrounded by pine trees and a bohemian atmosphere. I want to know which part of Dalat Lonely Planet stayed in , because we are not surrounded by pine trees or bohemians! I hate to bitch, but neither James nor I are particularly thrilled by Dalat. As we came into the city, there were beautiful pine trees, lush mountains, stunning areas for walking. I was getting very excited! And we drove in, past all the French architecture and hilly terraces. It was like a French Vietnam, and looked stunning. And then we turned a corner, and we were in the slums. This wasn’t stunning, this wasn’t French! We passed tin sheds and dodgy street vendors, and went down a narrow dirt alleyway, where we were brought to our hotel, a brand new affair by the people who ran the bus. The hotel is nice. It’s clean and fresh. But it’s also sparse and lacking character, and our room on the first floor is spacious and pleasant, but it is goddamn loud here. And there’s no shower recess, which makes the flicking the light switch off after a shower a nervous experience! Because this place is so new, there’s nothing to buffer the sound, so all night we were kept awake by the talking of the night staff, and we were up at 7 thanks to people getting up and leaving. We’re going to ask to be moved to higher room for tonight, because the noise was just unbearable. It’s like a megaphone right into our ears. That’s also because every door has two blocks with patterns on them that means we can never completely close this room up from the sound.
But on the good things, the climate here is wonderful. It’s quite cool, but not so cool that you freeze. Although I did actually shiver last night as we made our way to find dinner. Everyone here wears bulky jackets. Last night’s dinner experience was great, though. We walked for ages, trying to find an open, half-decent looking restaurant, and finally came across one that looked good. So I knocked on the door, and a woman came down the stairs, looking very confused.
She opened the door and stared at us. We said,
“Food? Restaurant?”
We mimed eating. She looked even more confused. She was about mid-thirties, and she turned and yelled something in Vietnamese, calling for somebody. Then we realised that we had just knocked on the door of someone’s home. It wasn’t a restaurant at all! We were like,
“Where can we get food?”
And mimed the food again. Then she seemed to understand, and she took us around to a restaurant behind her house.
Later, I laughed over the thought of being in Perth and opening your door one day and seeing two foreigners standing there miming “food.”
When we went into the restaurant, there was a boy watching TV. James had to approach him, and again we got the blank, wide-eyed stare of both shock and confusion. He didn’t speak any English. He yelled for someone to come, while still staring at us. We tried miming “menu?” and eventually he gave us one, but, lo and behold, it was all in Vietnamese! Mystery dinner! We started laughing a bit, and then suddenly the whole family was there, trying to help us. The dad could speak a little bit of English. He was in his 40s and wore a faded denim jacket. Last night’s booze seeped through his pores, and his face had a tautness to it so that it looked like fresh leather. We first wanted a beer and a scotch. James had to get out of his seat and point to the Scotch, but it was impossible to explain Coke, so we gave up and bought a whole bottle of red.
We opened the menu’s, and the father stood with us, pointing out dishes and saying words in his limited English. He kept pointing to the beef and saying “steak,” like that was what we Westerners would like to it. I crossed the page with my finger and said,
“No beef,” and he understood. He flicked to the fish page, because nowhere in Vietnam is selling chicken right now. By this time, we were getting too confused to try end up with something we might eat, so we said,
“Fish, yes,” and he ran off. A young girl brought over peanuts and warm handtowels, and we munched on them, giggling to ourselves about how bizarre this experience was. It was the first time we had eaten anywhere that had such a minimal grasp of English, and it was strange to realise that we were a complete novelty to this family. At one stage, a toddler girl stuck her head into the restaurant and stared at us with wide, brown eyes, then scarpered back into the safety of the family home behind the shop.
Then our meal came. We had fish. We had an entire fish! Head and all, crispy and delicious looking, on a bed of greens. Boy did we dig in! After chuckling for awhile over ordering a whole fish, we pigged in. It was so tender and so delicious. Actually, when it first came out, I asked the girl what it was, and she was like,
“Oh.”
And turned to take the fish back into the kitchen. James and I were like,
“No, no, no!” And I physically took the plate from her hand. So we still have no idea what kind of fish it was. It looked like some kind of trout. All we know is that it was delicious and extremely garlicky. We had a lot of trouble sleeping that night because of how gross and garlicky our mouths were. But when we were eating it, we didn’t realise how garlicky it was. The only thing that sucked about it was that we got charged for the warm napkins and the peanuts! Rude! We thought they were complimentary, because you often get complimentary items in Vietnam, particularly pots of tea. We’re getting very used to chamomile tea.
Oh yeah, and as we were walking to this restaurant, there was a truck parked in someone’s driveway. It had an open tray, and about four kids were in the back of it. They were across the road, and when one of them saw us he yelled out,
“Hello! What your name?”
Which was terribly cute. The kids here always say “hello” when you pass, I think to test out their English.
James has actually been quite funny the last couple of days, insisting that men are staring at my tits. I just laugh and tell him,
“It’s only because I have tits!” Compared to the Vietnamese women, I think my…er…voluptuousness is a rare sight for the men here.
(continued at around 8:00pm, Phuong Tran Hotel, Dalat)
So our experience last night was highly amusing. And I guess the thing to remember is that, up till this point, I was writing my journal entry in an extremely bad mood. We hadn’t had a good morning at all. As I mentioned earlier, we slept terribly. The noise carries here like nothing I’ve experienced before, and our garlicky mouths were making me feel nauseas. Also, my bowels were churning a little, and I knew I was going to have a surprise attack from the brown bandit the next morning. Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but it still started the day off on a bad note. Then we wandered for hours trying to find a stupid café and somewhere to eat lunch, and I had no idea where we were and James was also a bit lost. I started to get a bit cranky because I had no control over our direction, because I didn’t know the map and I didn’t know what the name of the café was. The Lonely Planet guide to Dalat is rubbish, and we’re quite irritated by it. We’re also turning into semi-backpacker snobs, with James commenting today that it’s actually quite annoying that everything anyone does is dictated by the Lonely Planet guides. Not that Lonely Planet aren’t good, they are great, but we’ve only got the Asia on a Shoestring one, so the information is quite limited. That being said, the café they recommended turned out to be very cool, it’s just that it took us awhile to get there. But I’ll get to that in a second. Anyway, after our disenchantment with Lonely Planet because of the rubbish segment on Dalat, we’ve decided to try to be a bit more independent with our travels. But we also don’t have much time, so L.P. is good for finding out quickly the best things about a city. And we’re hoping to stay in a hotel they recommended in Nha Trang, so I can’t speak too ill of LP. It’s just Dalat that has annoyed us. Anyway. This is wrong. We’re not annoyed with Dalat. After our evening here, we’ve grown to like it. But I’ll get to that in a moment. I have to continue explaining our terrible morning.
So finally we find a restaurant that serves breakfast, but we both end up with alarming mystery meats on our plates, so we end up eating only half our food. Then as we were walking back we saw the café and decided it looked crappy, kept walking, and suddenly a taxi driver started speaking to us in very good English.
“Where you from?”
“Australia.”
“Oh! Melbourne or Sydney?”
“Uh, neither. Perth.”
He started showing us tours he does around Dalat, but it was out of our budget, so we hired him as a metered taxi and got him to take us to a pagoda where a crazy monk lives who draws really bad paintings and insists you buy them. It’s meant to be one of the highlights of Dalat. The taxi-driver, named Happy, takes us down this dodgy, bumpy dirt alleyway, and stops in front of a house with a sandy-coloured puppy in the front yard.
James and I both got a little worried at this time. We had no idea where Happy had brought us, and, quite frankly, we thought we’d been completely fucked over. But then Happy said,
“Here we are!” and he pointed behind him to a small pagoda. But it was closed. Monk’s Day Off. So we were stuffed. We had no idea what we wanted to do, but we knew there were meant to be nice waterfalls around, so we asked him to take us to one. But he said, of the closest ones, one was smelly and the other dried up.
“Tiger Falls nice,” he said. “I take you Tiger Falls? About 15km.”
He spoke about tours again, but we decided to go metered. Mistake. 15km is a lot longer than we thought. Happy kind of tried to talk us out of it, but we insisted, so he was like,
“Okay, if that what you want.”
So we drive along bumpy roads, through more shanty towns, turn down the single worst road I’ve ever been down (I was thrown from side-to-side in my seat thanks to the roughness of the road). It took us over ½ an hour. And by the time we got there it was already at 160,000 Dong. I was not happy. See, I’ve kind of placed the responsibility of the choice on both of us right now, but it was James who had insisted we go metered. I had just gone with it, assuming he knew what he was talking about. I rely on James a lot, actually, he seems more in control than me a lot of the time. He takes care of directions, negotiations, major decisions. I’m in control of making sure we keep in the budget. Hence I was very cross to see that this stupid taxi trip to some dumb waterfall had totally blown our daily budget. Well, not totally, but it almost had. Still, I’m as much to blame as James, because I didn’t say anything, and I agreed to go along with the plan. I tend to just agree a lot, because I don’t feel confident making travel decisions since this is my first time backpacking. Anyway. We’ve learned our lesson.
So we were at the falls, and we had to pay an additional entry fee, then we had to almost rush around because Happy was being paid to wait for us (500 Dong a minute, which is about 0.05cents, so not too bad). But the falls were stunning. It was like something down South, but much kitscher. The steps were rough stone steps, uneven and exhausting to climb, but the falls were large and magnificent. Enormous plaster tigers dominated the entrance to the falls, and there were monkeys in a cage. Also, a rope bridge, with a capacity of six people. Not many! Slightly nerve-racking! We stayed there for about fifteen minutes, and then began the drive home. I didn’t speak much. Neither did James.
The taxi ended up costing us 284000 dong, which is about $23. But we hadn’t completely blown our budget, we still had about 60,000 for dinner. I was still feeling so sick and annoyed by how much 2 hours of our day had cost us, that we went back to the hotel and decided to nap and watch TV. I told myself that after my nap, I would pretend I was waking up again, and start the day afresh.
“True Lies” was on TV, and I drifted in and out of sleep while we watched it. James was very sweet, he knew I was feeling dodgy, so we snuggled up on the bed and both dozed for about two hours. When we woke up, I was still feeling a little cranky. I kept thinking about how much I hated Dalat, and how I couldn’t wait to be out of here. James felt the same way.
We decided to go for a walk and take photos of the shanty town our hotel is near. It looks like something out of a cowboy film, with leaning wooden shacks and men doing blacksmith work out the front of their shops. We had passed through it that morning and I had said,
“I think we need to rearrange our thinking about Dalat. It’s not that bad, it’s just not what we had expected. It’s interesting in its own way.”
And by that I meant this, the cowboy strip, like something out of “Mad Max” or “Jeremiah.” People sat and watched us as we passed, some smiling, some just looking like they’d never seen a tourist before.
We decided to wander back to this street in the afternoon, and then head to the café we had earlier thought looked lame. We also wanted to check out a restaurant called 100 Roofs. 100 Roofs was closed, so you can imagine how that helped bolster our wonderful mood. First the monk, now the funky-looking restaurant. James said,
“Maybe the guy from 100 Roofs is out having a drink with the crazy monk.”
I didn’t laugh.
So we decided to go have a coffe at Café Tung, a café supposedly favoured by Vietnamese intellectuals, but all it looked like was seedy men looking seedy. We didn’t know what else to do, though, so we went in. There was a back section that was empty, and we sat there on leather benches that weren’t as soft as they looked. Then we started to relax. The place had an orange glow and a gentle atmosphere, and we were alone and at peace for the first time since arriving in Dalat. And maybe all we really needed was a damned good coffee! We ordered coffee with sweetened condensed milk, and it was quite possibly the best coffee we’d ever had in our whole lives. James claims it’s the only way he’s ever going to drink coffee ever again, so we have to try and find one of the special percolators they used. We drank some complimentary tea, drank our coffees and just chatted. We planned what we could do if we ended up leaving Vietnam early (because at the moment we’re two days ahead of our itinerary), and we talked about London and life in general. It was extremely pleasant, and we left the café in the first good mood we’d had all day. Today was the first time we’ve been grumpy (aside from the drama’s in the Saigon post office, which I’ll discuss in a minute). So, we were a little cheerier after the peaceful atmosphere of Café Tung, and we forgave LP a little, then we decided to find a hotel to eat. Except that there are some restaurants along a strip overlooking the main intersection of Dalat, so we decided to check these out. We both wanted a) a curry and b) a pizza, and were delighted when we found one that would do both. And do both vegetarian! We’ve started to try and eat vegetarian as much as possible. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s just safer in general.
When we got upstairs, the staff were friendly and eager to help us. We’ve heard several accounts of the Vietnamese being unfriendly, but we’re yet to really see this. Everybody here has been very friendly and very helpful. Anyway, the girl who served us seemed excited to be able to use her English, and she was very sweet and friendly. Her smile was large and her eyes warm. We ordered the vegetable curry and the vegetable pizza, and sat back with big smiles on our face. Perhaps Dalat wasn’t all bad. In fact, by this stage, we were becoming quite fond of the city. I think it’s the same thing as last night. There’s something lovely about Dalat at night. Dalat during the day is actually quite boring. Our highlights have been our dining experiences, which is quite unusual, I think. We also got a ½ hour free internet with our meal, so we checked our mail and generally felt nice about everything. As we walked home, the soccer was on.
Now. This is something I never knew about Vietnam, and isn’t in any of the guidebooks. The Vietnamese fucking LOVE soccer. I have never experienced anything like it. The cities stop for the Vietnam soccer team. Shopfronts crowd with people, and the joy that is experienced when Vietnam win is phenomenal. That being said, we’re about to find out what it feels like when Vietnam lose, because we’ve been watching the Vietnam/Thailand game while I’ve been typing this, and they’ve just lost 3-0. Uh oh. The Vietnamese are fiercely patriotic, and in our last night in Saigon, we experienced the insanity of their love for the game.
It started when we came out of the cinemas. Yes, in our last day in Saigon, we went to the movies. It was a goal of James, to watch a movie in a foreign country, and after the morning we’d had, the thought of an air-conditioned movie theatre was orgasmic. Hang on. Let me start from the beginning of our last day in Ho Chi Minh City, which was Friday the 2nd of December. We had decided to spend the day organising Christmas presents for everyone at home. Easy, we thought, it won’t take long at all! Plus the Saigon post office is meant to be a tourist attraction. We figured it would at least be air-conditioned. My goodness. So we walked around for hours in Ben Thanh markets. Well, not hours, maybe about an hour, but we couldn’t find anything for my mum, and James was getting a little frustrated, and we were both hot, and finally he was like,
“Well, what did you get her last year?”
And I said, “Money. We always just give her money or a voucher.”
Mum, you are the single HARDEST person to buy presents for. Eventually we found something, but it ended up being an anticlimax, and we were just glad to get out of there. Then we hiked and trekked in the first sweltering hot Ho Chi Minh day we’d experienced to the post office where, to our disgust, it wasn’t only not airconditioned, but there was barely any clear order to the whole affair. There were no queues, people just pushed into any available space at the counter. And the building was nice, but we were so hot and exhausted that all we could see were the dirty counters and crazy parcel system and the dozens of people waiting to be served. So we sat and dripped sweat onto the cards we were writing and attempted to organise all the presents. There were five separate parcels in total, including some posters we had bought for ourselves that we were sending on to Angela in London. They’re super cool old propaganda posters showing everyone in a Communist paradise, and they’re the first big present we’ve bought for ourselves. James just kissed my toe. He’s so cute. Anyway, so we went to Saigon post office, and we were hot and icky, but we got everything sorted and then we went up to the window to organise everything. Now there are about fifty trillion windows in Saigon post office, and the only one not getting any service was the one we were at. Typical. Then this weird American guy came and stood too close to me, and we tried to get in front because he stood in front of us like a line-jumper. We shot forward as soon as we could, and the American guy didn’t fight us, but he also didn’t move, so again he was alarmingly close to me, and he just stood there. It was bizarre. I gave James a “what the fuck’s with this guy?” look, and he just shrugged. I could feel him getting increasingly annoyed by the fact that absolutely no one was paying us any attention. We’d been standing there for over ½ an hour, waiting. James thinks it was more than that, but maybe it was just that it felt like more than that. Then finally we got served, and the woman spoke no English, and couldn’t understand that the parcels needed to go to different places in Australia, so we just collapsed on the counter and said,
“Forget it. All Australia. One address.”
Sorry, mum! I hope you don’t mind being the bearer of this burden, it’s just that your address was the only one we knew confidently off the top of our head, and we were just way too exhausted to argue or to explain. And we still needed to send postcards and a second parcel to London. So from this window, we got sent to another. Then another. And about three hours later we finally left the post office, and we were so hot and cranky that we decided to treat ourselves to a nice air-conditioned movie and some popcorn and bubble tea. We watched “Red Eye,” which wasn’t too bad.
After the movie we headed outside and there was a crowd like nothing we’d seen before. It made no sense. The streets were blocked, everybody just standing still, an energy filling the air. Then we saw the big screen. And the soccer. And we got our first taste of the insane soccer love that exists in Vietnam. Everybody stops for the game. Everybody feels for the game. And the cheers that erupted when Vietnam scored was infectious and enthralling. But the most bizarre thing was when Vietnam won. I have never seen ANYTHING like it. The streets were jampacked with scooters, all waving Vietnamese flags, cheering, screaming, people beating drums. They did bog-laps around the city for over four hours! Non-stop, around and around, two to a scooter, an endless stream of celebration. Everybody was yelling, cheering, insanely happy. The energy in the air was passionate, excited, electric. The honking, the sheer number of people, it was jaw-dropping and electrifying. Tonight, as we walked home, we saw similar things, but nowhere near as intense as Saigon. Dalat had people stopping in the street to watch TVs in electrical goods stores, and every shop we passed had the TV on. Everyone watches soccer here. Men, women, children. Everyone. The only people walking the streets are foreigners. The rest are either driving to somewhere to watch the game, or already holed up in a shop. So. The Vietnamese love soccer. And after tonight’s tragic loss, I’m very glad we’re not in Ho Chi Minh right now!!
Another key thing from our last day in Saigon was seeing the beggars. As we neared the richer area, we saw more beggars than we’d ever seen before. And we saw the single most horrifying beggar ever. I hate to say it, I hate to sound discriminating or superior, but my God. I couldn’t even look this guy in the face. In fact, he had no face. His appearance will never leave me. He had no lips, his eyes were stretched wide like they were being held open by a clamp, his teeth were gapped, his skin was stretched tight. He was a burns victim. It looked like something had exploded in his face, and somehow he had survived. He looked like a skull. A living skull. Needless to say, we gave him money. I’ve never seen anything like him in my life. With him as a benchmark of beggars, it’s going to be hard to give money away ever again! Every time we see someone begging and they only have a missing limb we think, Geez, it’s not that bad! It’s nowhere near as bad as the guy in Saigon! We refer to him as “no-face” which is cruel but horrifyingly apt.
The next day, our last day in Saigon and our trip to Dalat (Saturday the 3rd), we caught a luxury coach because we knew it was going to take hours. We had heaps of leg room, and the seats went back so far it was like lying down. We left at 8am. We arrived in Dalat at 5:30pm. The funny thing about Vietnam is that because labour is so cheap, there are a total excess of staff everywhere. We had two helpers on the bus, one a young girl and the other a young man, plus the driver. It was unnecessary, but the girl was very talkative and friendly, and pointed out sights as we went. She was extremely difficult to understand, though, and a few times I found myself simply staring at her blankly. There was a TV, and they showed first lame video clips of some Asian popstar, then a Michael Jackson live movie, and then finally some comedy show that the staff seemed to find hilarious. I managed to finish the whole “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (thank you Jessica! It was absolutely brilliant, and I loved every second of it. I’m passing it on to James to read now! It was excellent to read on the bus because it was so easy to read and completely engaging). Thanks to the book, the time passed extremely quickly. We stopped twice, as well. First was at some dodgy roadside stall with toilets, which was relieving (squats, but better than nothing). The second we stepped off, there were about six women with baskets forcing fruit onto us. This was the first time I ended up buying something just to get someone to leave me alone. This woman was like No-Face from “Spirited Away,” nudging me in the back and going “eh, eh” all the time, until finally I relented and bought a pineapple on a stick. It was delicious, and only about 5000 Dalat, which was about 0.40 cents. We also got a soft drink and a packet of gross biscuits that even thinking about two days later makes me feel ill. Later, the second stop, was for lunch at a massive cafeteria where we had fried rice and I experienced the joy of squat toilets yet again.
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is how hard it is to stop using broken English. James said that, no matter how much he knows it’s wrong, he can’t help but think that if he speaks slower and louder eventually they’ll understand, right? I do the same. It’s a weird instinct. We know it won’t help, yet we still try. I’m finding that as soon as I speak to anyone with a thick accent, I revert to that broken English, and sometimes, even with James, I catch myself doing it. You get so used to speaking in rough, easy-to-understand sentences that it almost becomes habit.
Oh. And one of my fillings has fallen out, which is annoying. I might go to a dentist in Thailand, because apparently there are good dentists there that will be half the price of London but just as good. I just hope no more serious damage is done to the tooth until then.
And there was a random, brand new Daewoo dealership in the middle of nowhere, and James and I were just like “what the fuck???”. It was seriously in the middle of nowhere. But it made a nice change from the Catholic churches. There is an alarming number of churches in the small villages. It just reeks of missionary work.
(continued at 3:00pm, in Nha Trang)
And a few quick notes on things we’ve seen or that I have observed or that I have thought, or just banter in general.
1. We passed a bus shelter in Saigon, where there were a suffocating number of people waiting, mingling, rushing past. There were old women sitting on the kerb with big vats of mystery meals, and scrawny men with pointy features pushed past us. We even got to witness a fight! A man walked up and kicked another man in the back. It was exciting. We moved on very, very quickly.
2. We had to work for several days to shrink our stomachs up after Singapore. We got fed so much, that we found big meals weren’t satisfying us, so we very consciously ate small meals until we found small meals were filling us up. We’ve also discovered that the best thing you can do is get a hotel that provides breakfast. It’s so important, because you end up eating a huge breakfast, you don’t need lunch, and then you have a nice dinner. You might pay a little more, but the amount of time and hassle it saves is priceless. In Dalat we stayed somewhere without breakfast, and it was a pain in the arse trying to find somewhere that did a decent breakfast. So we’ve decided never again!
3. Also, in Saigon, we tried soursop and saporadilla(?) shakes. Bee-Saigon made exceptional, outstanding, fabulously wonderful shakes. What was their secrete ingredient? Sweetened condensed milk! And it was mostly pureed fruit and a bit of ice. Oh it was so heavenly!!! Anyway, we decided to branch out and try the shakes made of fruit we’d never heard of. And they were delicious! Soursop was strange; it was both sweet and sour, and yummo! Saparodilla was equally divine, much sweeter. It’s great trying strange exotic fruits. Thankfully James is over durian after Singapore, because I’m still not a big fan of it.
4. It seems to me, as well, that the people here never sleep! Everything is open until midnight, and then it opens again at six a.m. Usually it’s the same workers, doing both graveyard and morning, and they look super perky! So I think people here survive on a few hours sleep only or something. It’s strange.
5. We also saw a Buddhist nun walking down the street, but she wasn’t begging like people normally beg. She was holding a silver bowl, but the bowl had the lid on, so it wasn’t obvious. James gave her money (it’s not that James is the only one who ever gives people money, it’s just that he carries around the loose change, whereas I usually carry the larger notes), and she opened the lid subtly to let him drop the money in. Then James took a quick photo of her, and it turned out quite nice. It was interesting that the nun’s asking of donations was so subtle.
6. When we went and saw “Mat Do” (Red Eye), we went to a fancy shopping mall, and were quite shocked by how obvious the class divide in Vietnam still is. We thought it might not be so obviously classed, but there we were, sitting at a bar surrounded by yuppie teenagers, blowing money on booze and video games. It was like being in Singapore.
7. And the name of the restaurant in Dalat that had kickarse vegetable curry and pizza was called Viet Hung.