Dalat – City in the Central Highlands

From Level Zero to 1500 meters in half a day: that’s about what it takes to get from Nha Trang at the coast to the main place in the mountains. By bus. You also can take the bicycle as one of my fellow hotel patrons did, it just takes longer 🙂
Travelling the plains is easy, but wait until you get to the mountains. Steep, windy roads, sometimes just wide enough for a bus or a truck, but definitely not both, as we experienced. And talk about „speeding“: our bus driver just left one truck after the other behind him, taking over on straights, in curves, whereever. Sometimes I wonder why I haven’t seen more accidents except the single one that involved „only“ two cyclists.

Gone with the wind, Vietnamese version or „How to lose your luggage and getting it back„: Once in Dalat, our second stop was at my desired hotel. I had a quick view to the available rooms and when I went back down to the lobby, the bus had – well, disappeared. Wow, what a surprise and what a feeling! I had my valuables and most important thingies with my in my small backpack, but all the rest (clothes, toiletries, medication,…) was in the large pack, and that was (hopefully) whereever the bus was.

Thanks God I have a wonderful hosting couple here at the hotel. The landlord just set out on his motorbike within a minute, me on the backseat, and we went chasing for the bus and my belongings. And we didn’t have to search for long. The bus had continued to another hotel down the road, just 300 meters. But the faces of the bus driver and other staff there were a bit surprised as well, when they realised they had left too early for some of the passengers 😉

EasyRider, Vietnamese version: One of the absolut best things you can do here! The EasyRiders here are a couple of gentlemen (around 80) who possess real motorbikes and take us tourists out of town to the mountain roads and the sights around Dalat.
And if you like that, you can rent them even for a couple of days for a tour along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Central Highlands as far up to the north as Hanoi or as far south as the Mekong Delta.

I rode a whole day with Hong, a nice and friendly guy in his 50ies and he showed my around quite a bit. Sticking with my animal passion for example, we had a close encounter with cattle on the road and silk worms right beside the road. Well, I didn’t hug both of them like I (nearly) did with the tigers in Thailand, but still something I will remember.

Apart from that I saw also waterfalls, pagodas, mountain roads, napalm- and agent orange-„treated“ hill sides, mulberry farms (the stuff those lovely little silk worms feed on), mushroom farms, coffee and tea plantations (all family owned, not one of the big industrialised plantations) and finally „Crazy House“! The latter looks like being from a fantasy novel, a house being built into a tree or a tree with a lot of rooms in it. Upon reading about it in Lonely Planet, I thought „yeah, another place created by a hyper-excentric wanna-be artist“, but the place is really cool in a way!

One of the nicest thing was that whereever we went we always were at family places and Hong did his best to facilitate the communication between the Vietnamese and me. Funnily enough a few questions come popping up again and again, among them the question whether I am already married.

The wonders of Vietnamese Cuisine – eating out the really nice way: he who travels shall eat – and so I did. The hotel people recommended two fantabulous restaurants: the Wild Sunflower and the Art Cafe, both luckily not far away. First dinner it was caramelised fish in hot claypot with steamed rice. Marvellous! Folks, you need to try this, even if it is the only thing you come for to Dalat!

Or take the chicken in lemon grass and chili sauce at the Art Cafe – wonderful! And caramel flan with hot black coffee for dessert – delicious! I am already looking forward to tonight’s dinner, yummie 🙂

Tomorrow I will leave this nice place again and head for Mui Ne and it’s giant sand dunes. Stay tuned, Radio MidagiSan is soon on air again.