It’s Thursday evening, and we are now in Dalat, a really nice hilly town in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. We recently returned from QUITE the whirlwind tour of the area with a group of guides, called the “Easy Riders” who drive you around the countryside on motorcycles and tell you all about things here, but I'll get back to that in a minute...
So, we got here from Mui Ne, our last stop, via an experience that will for sure be one of our most memorable (read: awful) transportation memories! Imagine the following:
1. Friday morning - we are sitting in a little tourist office waiting for "Big Sitting Bus" to arrive at 1pm. It is hot, VERY hot, and we are sweating bullets.
2. A mini bus (“this can’t be the bus, right?” we think) arrives around 1:30pm, JAM PACKED with Vietnamese people and 2 shouting drivers beckon for us to come over.
3. The drivers take our big bags and proceed to CRAM them mercilessly under the back seats of the van.
4. We climb over the back seat from the trunk to get in because there is absolutely no other way.
5. We stop 10 minutes later for one more large Irish man (that's it we think...right?). We exchange knowing glances (Yep, this is THE bus).
6. We stop to pick up another Vietnamese couple who sit in our back seat with us, and Arati has to hold the man's luggage over the back seat while the driver slams the trunk closed.
7. We get onto the very bumpy, windy road for our (supposedly) 4 hr. journey to Dalat.
8. The van overheats on its way up a hill.
9. We all kindly donate our water bottles to remedy the problem...and we get to drive about 100 more meters up the hill as a result of our donations.
10. We find a stream and proceed to fill plastic bottles with water and dump them on the engine to cool it off. It works (fingers crossed). We leave again.
11. The drivers turn on the loudest, Vietnamese/Western pop music on for the remainder of the now 5+ hour ride and the speaker is pretty much in my left ear.
12. We get to Dalat just as the sun is setting.
13. We haul our bags and check into our hotel. Its name? The Peace Hotel J
BUT, we are, once again, safe and sound...with memories and more memories.
ANYWAY, the town of Dalat itself is very different from Mui Ne, where we thoroughly enjoyed the beach and most of all sledding on the plastic sleds down the sand dunes. What great fun! We also got to go to the "Fairy Stream" there where you seemingly walk on water because it's so shallow (see the picture at the right)...it actually was a big tourist trap/sight in our opinions, but it was still really pretty even though I did not feel like a fairy at all. Oh well.
Dalat is much cooler and crisper than Mui Ne because of the altitude change. Yesterday, I went for a long trek up 3 peaks with 2 awesome Vietnamese guides and 2 other Dutch travelers who were on a 3 week trip here. The 5 of us started by ascending the tallest peak, which is 2,169 m tall, and it was a REALLY steep, muddy climb, but lots of fun of course. There were really gorgeous views of all the terraces of farmland, horses all over the place, coffee plantations, and a big lake off in the distance. There were also many different kinds of plant life, from really tall pine trees at first to jungle plants and trees later on, and there were hardly any other people there, which made things very peaceful. After the first peak, we had a lunch of bread, cheese, and as many different fruits as you can imagine (bananas, pineapples (with chili powder!), dragon fruit, lychee, mandarin oranges, cucumbers, etc.) - yummmm. Then, we went up the other 2 (easier to climb) peaks before going all the way back to the bottom.
Our guides were 2 Vietnamese tourism students who were about 24 years old also. It might be an obvious thing to say, but, as we travel, I especially love getting to know people my age from the countries we're visiting. It just makes it much easier to compare cultures and then imagine things like what your life would be like if you lived in another country.
So, all in all, it was a great first day here, and the fresh mountain air felt incredible (particularly after the terrible bus ride!). Arati and I crashed really early though, and barely made it to our beds before passing out!
Today, as I mentioned at the beginning, we got a whirlwind tour of the area and a much closer look at some of the countryside I’d seen from the mountain tops. It's not really a town that you can explore adequately on foot or with bicycles even because the "good stuff" is all really spread out. Our "Easy Rider" motorcycle guides were so great, and, unlike my trekking guides, our two fearless leaders, Tue and Hip ("like Hip Hop" he noted) were more around grandpa age - which made for a nice contrast with my previous day. These 2 men have been a part of this tour group from its foundation in 1992, and were so knowledgeable about everything we saw and much more. They clearly love both their town and country, and they were more than willing to give us some of the best hands-on history and culture lessons that I've ever had.
Together, the four of us went all around and visited the following places/sights:
1. The first Buddhist Pagoda in Dalat, built in 1921.
2. Flower farms with Gerber daisies and roses - interestingly, the techniques for flower farming here were adapted from the Dutch methods a few decades ago. Hip told us that it wasn't until the embargo from the US was lifted and the economy started to improve that "peoples' bellies were full so they could then appreciate flowers"
3. A small coffee plantation - did you know that Vietnam is #2 for coffee production? (Brazil is #1, Colombia is #3, followed by Mexico and then Indonesia). I didn’t know that.
4. Small homes where people were: basket weaving, making brooms, and making rice wine to sell at the markets
5. A silk factory - It was so cool to see the whole process from start to finish, AND I ate a dried silk worm larva! It tasted like a peanut :)
6. Elephant Falls – a really pretty, and quite big, set of waterfalls.
7. The Crazy House - a hotel created by a Vietnamese woman and architect with really unique themed rooms (i.e. the bear room, pheasant room, kangaroo room, and termite room!) and staircases and walls that are skinny and twisty and topsy turvy. You have to look this place up to see some photos! We felt like we were in Alice in Wonderland.
8. A cable car across the hills and farms
PHEW! Long day! But definitely exhilarating too - I'm a little worn out though, and I'm looking forward to a slow and relaxed night.
After 2 great days here, we are leaving on a bus (cross your fingers for a real BIG BUS this time!) tomorrow morning to head back toward the coast to a town called Na Trang, where it should be warmer and there is supposed to be some good snorkeling.
After that, we are going to really start working our way up this long skinny country, which has a coastline of about 3,000 km (1,864 miles). They say it's only a little longer than California though if you are not following the coastline exactly (or just over 1,000 miles), so HOPEFULLY, we won't feel the miles add up too quickly! Arati is definitely better at being zen-like on the long bus rides than I am. I'm still working on that skill and usually just read, do tons of crossword puzzles, and stare out the window with some music...I'm trying to tame the "antsy-ness" gene as much as I can :) I just love moving OUTSIDE the bus so much more… but I guess it’s inevitable that you have to travel to get TO the places. Not a terrible downside of this whole adventure if there must be a couple.
Anyway,
that's all for now.
Hopefully you all can see some of the new pictures I was able to put up from some random times during the last 8 weeks. I'll keep trying to get more up.
Also, sorry if there are lots of misspellings. The spell check feature no longer works it seems and I can't catch all my mistakes when I'm trying to keep my internet time and fees minimal - hopefully they aren't too bad!
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