My Vietnam Launch – Dalat – 2018 Backpacking
Standby for lots of photos that will surprise you.
My Nha Trang hangout beer bungalow continued to serve up many great conversations with other tourists, Ray, Lee, Adam & his gf, Amy where I was convinced, I needed to get my itchy feet moving and overcome my laziness staying in this comfortable zone city; so, I took the comment from some of these new bungalow friends stating Dalat was the next decent stay place & started to book the bus trip (4hrs 119K Dong, $7AUD). My bungalow was such a cruisey place to just hangout & see the beach world just pass you by.
Saying good-bye to Perry at the iHome Hostel and to pass on my many thanks to Julia who was having a day off I met the Singh bus at 9am out the front of their office nearby only to be surprised by sharing the trip with Adam & Amy. We had to sit in the allocated ticket seats so Adam & Amy were pushed to the rear of the bus & I had to take the central seat sharing with a young Vietnamese girl who wouldn’t speak to me until basically our arrival at Dalat. The bus wasn’t the best I had been on either, so fingers crossed again we make it. We left on such a glorious day where temperatures were constantly in the 39°C range only to depart the city surrounds in escalating rain. The air con was also set on a very low temperature which had us all in shivering mode, not being able to gain our extra clothing in our bags.
Of course, the trip turned into 5.5hrs (the bus was so underpowered on this mountainous 1,500m climb) and the rain never stopped. Adam was so over the trip .. he was fuming whereas I was too cold & starting to get soaked to encourage the venting. We were let out on the outskirts of the city for some unknown reason, so Adam, Amy & I shared a cab to our respective hotels. Adam/Amy’s hotel was first. It was outstanding & very upmarket, but mine, Nguyen Minh Hostel, being only $9.90USD/ nite with brekky) was to be expected. It was now 21°C and teeming rain which also created a wind chill factor to make it somewhere around 16°C & a big swing from my normal sunny/ humid 39°C. My room was quite nice but on the 3rd floor which means 6 flights of stairs and they were only 2ft wide. With a double backpack it was not fun. Definitely one-way traffic on these stairs.
Renovations were underway next door so sleep was impossible with a before 6am start against a non-stop major transport road. This will be another test to my acceptance of dealing with things as they eventuate. Of course, with the weather change and the rain still happening I headed towards getting a cold. With my eyes almost closed for more sleep I trundled down the stairs to be greeted by a very busy woman who looked like does everything here. I was besotted by the woman’s baby daughter, about 3 ½ yrs old & very tiny who hands you a menu & you point to the picture & she races back into the kitchen & shows her Mum who nods & starts to prepare. Soooo cute!!!!!!!
On finishing brekky, I scoured towards the tourism centre only to find it shut down. Oh well!!! Dalat is a city of 425,000 where there is no prominent entry point of interest or significant landmark. It’s just a large town that grew & redevelopment started in a haphazard isolated way, apart from the lake area. My decision was to first venture towards the city centre but not directly. Somehow, by sheer fluke, I found myself out the front of Adam’s ‘palatial’ hotel and almost instantly Adam comes out with a cigarette & sees me walking. We stopped & chatted for a while & he confirmed they would be leaving the next day due to cancellations of their activities, etc due to the poor weather. He was not happy with his well-known Irish weather following him & stated there was a typhoon happening up near Hanoi & their journey is heading North as well. Double whammy.
I wished Adam well & safe travels & further up the road, the rain was getting heavier & I found part relief under a large café umbrella against the roadway wondering where to go next. Out of the blue, 3 Vietnamese young men called me over from a cafe. They were all having coffee. They provided me with a tiny Kindergarten-type stool and wanted to talk about myself & my travels. I ordered a Vietnamese coffee through one of the young men who spoke the best English. He translated our conversations to the others. The coffee came with a strainer, cup & jug to which I was not accustomed to. The young man, then prepared it for me & explained the sequence to ensuring I get the best serving of the coffee. This coffee was amazing and so good but I think I would struggle again trying to remember the procedure.
One by one they all said good-bye in their broken English & wished me well, leaving just one of the guys behind momentarily where I went to pay for my coffee & theirs, only to be told one of the other guys had already paid for me. WOW!! Such kindness and I was troubled that I couldn’t repay the kind favour for he vanished so quick to his scooter. With the rain now easing I headed towards the city centre & the markets. I could not believe the amount of fruit, vegies, flowers & the like that you could buy here & so cheap. The markets were huge!!! That explains the hectares & hectares of sheltered garden houses we saw coming into Dalat. Apparently, Dalat is a major food supplier (food bowl) to Vietnam. Visiting a few stalls, I loaded up with a huge number of strawberries, giant avocado & oranges and they were the best quality I had ever seen. All in all, I had walked 4Klms in the morning & I was scoffing the fruit down all night to boost my Vit C intake to overcome this cold eventuating & getting an afternoon catchup of ‘lost’ sleep.
Feeling so much better the next day I headed back to the café to hopefully return the favour to the young men I had met for coffee. Unfortunately, they didn’t turn up after much waiting. Their generosity & kindness will stay with me to eternity & I will forever pay it forward when opportunities arise. I walked the outer rim of the city, mainly around the immense lake and ventured wherever there was an attraction to see. The weather prevented me from taking the tourist chairlift ride so it was a lot more walking for me today. For dinner, I had to search a fair distance from my hotel to find something that suited my belief in food .. I’m very conservative on my intake. As you can see in the photo, I had little choice in this menu. Certainly, avoided the eels & frogs for starters. What would be your choice?
The next day, having brekky with the hotel’s baby daughter, I went back to the markets for more fruit. 1kg Strawberries (50K Dong), 1 Mango (10K Dong) & 2 huge avocados (40K Dong) which all equates to $4.50USD and a very cheap medicine to eventually remove my cold. From that event my new travel world was about to change .. BIG time!!!! I found a small area of a large patio to a disused building located above the markets on a busy city road to devour my fruit prize when I heard a “hello” from an elderly Vietnamese man in a wet weather poncho. He saw me from the other side of the road & we sat & talked for ages. His name was Chung Phan, a motorcycle ‘Easy Rider’ that does long tours for tourists or Dalat city day tours. I was slightly older than he, & with that he provided a range of reduced costs for me ($70USD down to $60USD/ day, accommodation included) to think about considering I informed him of no income & living off my savings. He showed me testimonials, the route he takes on his Jungle Tour”, etc which seemed amazing in the land he would cross over. I confirmed I would let him know after I think more about it that night checking on my limited budget. If I could have predicted my imminent future, I would have been far more comfortable in my spending but very few can predict the future & how things would work out. I should have trusted the universe more.
After eating my fruit & saying a ‘good-bye’ to Chung I ventured to another tourist attraction, The Maze Bar just up the road in Khu Hoa Binh (Street). This is a real quirky place. The front is a typical shop front and the price on entry is the price of a mandatory beer drink included. The sign challenges you to reach the top in a set timeframe with different levels of goals in finding the top bar on the 4th floor. This place would never meet the fire regs back home as it is a maze within a building, limited lighting and certainly is a challenge finding your way through various direction options. How would you escape this building if an emergency happened? Taking a bit more care & using what brain cells I had left, I managed to scale to the top in 15mins which is an expert time & the beer was most welcomed as my reward.
Making my way back to my hotel I immediately got the chills .. not from my now eliminated cold but from workers setting up the formwork to columns on a construction site some 5 floors up in constant rain with no perimeter barricades. One slip & they’re gone!!! Scary stuff as per the photo. Travelling through Cambodia & Vietnam I managed to see some incredible and unsafe building practices & I wish I could forget some of them. Running through Chung’s commentary on the way back to my hotel & sizing up the tour opportunity and with absolutely nothing on my horizon I surprised Chung in confirming by email to start the tour. He was quite excited and we exchanged a few emails to make sure everything is sorted. He later learned that my word was absolute truth as he thought I had just brushed him away when we originally met.
That night it was again hard to sleep even after using the fluffy doona as a mattress topper, but I could not also eliminate the ongoing transport & construction noise factor. On top of that, one could not keep thinking about my new 4-day jungle tour & that Chung would also drop me off to my next destination, Mu Nie (Moonay) some hours South East of Dalat on the coast to save me a lot of trouble.
The next day, I gained the chance of a scooter tut-tut to take me to the other side of the city to Crazy House for 20k Dong ($1USD). I gave the rider a tip too. Entry fee to the Crazy House was 50K Dong and this was most certainly a crazy house & of great value. I hope you like the photos and there were too many to place in this blog however this would give you the concept and amazing themes provided. The owners were expanding this house maze to another adjoining block and I got to see their construction method, albeit, I wished it was more structural seeing I’ve been a builder for over 35yrs. Crazy House Photos below with entrance as #1, then external facades in the courtyards, then typical hotel room & internal room murals, etc. Enjoy.
In this complex of weirdness, you can stay in their quirky hotel set up, although the rooms are quite limited and best to book early. After experiencing this one-of-a-kind crazy house, I walked back towards the city lake and saw more attractions and different modern constructions. With my new departure nearing I collected enough cash from my beloved Agri ATM & bought a couple of activity/ colouring books & pencils for the hotel’s daughter and a couple of matchbox cars for their 6yr old son. Both were ecstatic on receiving their gifts and their mother was almost crying with gratitude. For me, the simplest of things in life are the most pleasing.
On Saturday, 21st July, Chung arrived promptly at 8am out the front of my hotel standing in the rain with a poncho & plastic wrap bags for my backpacks. Within 2 minutes he had everything loaded onto his 500cc motorbike & for just a few minutes the rain had stopped for the photo. We are now on a 4day Jungle Tour as Easy Riders. It’s amazing when you meet people and instantly find comfort & trust in taking the big steps with them. Chung is a wonderful human! I was now on a journey where no-one would know where I am or if I’m OK. I must Skype my daughter each night to ensure all is well to alleviate this ‘fear’.
“Communication … Communication … Talk to each other”. From a song “Kite” on the concert DVD “Go Home” by U2 @ Slane Castle. YouTube have it also.
I always look forward to seeing the feedback so don’t be afraid to comment. My next blog/s will be more of the amazing Vietnam experiences and quite a few were life changing, & not just for me.
Live life to the most and a quote that I truly love is from Eckhart Tolle ..
“If I am not the hero of my life … who in the hell could be?”
BH Life Travels 