With my work finished for the year and our time in Chiang Mai at an end, Laurie and I met at the airport on a Sunday morning for our flight to Vietnam. During the hours and hours of travel research and obsessive flight searching that preceded this trip, I had found a direct flight from Chiang Mai to Saigon. It doesn’t operate every day, but it saves time and money compared to flying through Bangkok. Being the holders of e-visas, we were confused about how to proceed after landing in Saigon, but we figured out that we could enter any of the normal immigration lines, show our printed e-visa receipt to the officer, get our passport stamped, and be on our way.
(Sidebar: an incontrovertible truth of life is that the most delightful and relief-inducing sound you will ever hear is the kuh-chunk kuh-chunk noise when an immigration officer stamps your passport. A very close second is the whirring of a foreign ATM after it finally decides it’s going to give you money.)
Dalat
Back in November, when I was working on the Vietnam itinerary, I had decided to end the trip in Saigon to make subsequent travel plans easier. It then followed that Laurie and I would fly into Saigon, but not actually stop there yet. Given the timing of the flight from Chiang Mai and the time necessary to clear immigration and customs, only an evening flight out of Saigon would work for us and that greatly influenced the decision of where to go first. I had initially thought about going to a beach town on the eastern coast of the country, but none of the flight times worked out. Instead, I fell back to another, arguably more interesting, option: Dalat.
Dalat is a mountain town in the central highlands of Vietnam and used to be a holiday retreat for the French; they went there to escape the heat and humidity elsewhere in the country. Dalat is pine trees and strawberries and sweaters; no palm trees or coconuts or tank tops here. In the context of modern travel, its appeal is that it flies under the radar of most foreign travelers to Vietnam and has a lot of natural beauty and outdoor activities. With a massive metropolis and a beach town already on the itinerary, a hill station with cool weather seemed like a nice way to round out the trip.
Our one-hour, $4 VietJet flight wasn’t leaving until 10:00 that evening, so we had some time to kill in the airport. (Okay, so after taxes and fees, the flight was more like $38. But still, on the website, the flight costs $4 before you check out. Four dollars.) Laurie got her first pho of the trip and I got a photo with my new favorite airline. Everyone was happy.
After landing in Dalat, we hopped on the bus to town, which takes almost as much time as the flight from Saigon. We climbed winding mountain roads in the dark, passing dozens of other buses but not much other traffic. Once the bus started making random, scattered stops around town, we intently watched Google Maps on our phones until the bus stopped very close to our hotel, at which points we hopped out and walked the rest of the way.
The night’s peaceful rest was interrupted early the next morning by the sounds of thousands of motorbikes – pretty standard for Vietnam – but also by loud Christmas music and a choir of children’s voices coming from a nearby school. This was my first, but certainly not last, reminder that Christmas is a bigger deal here than I thought.
After a quick errand, we sat down for breakfast: our first banh mi of the trip. The iced coffee I ordered arrived with coconut ice cream in it. I was not angry.
Our first day in Dalat was intentionally unscheduled, as we had planned on simply wandering the town. The most popular – and goofiest – tourist site in the city is the Crazy House: a compound of buildings, trees, rooms, staircases, and other random shit that looks like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. The Wikipedia page describes it very well:
Described as a “fairy tale house” … the building’s overall design resembles a giant tree, incorporating sculptured design elements representing natural forms such as animals, mushrooms, spider webs and caves. Its architecture, comprising complex, organic, non-rectilinear shapes, has been described as expressionist.
Yeah, that just about sums it up. No straight lines, no right angles. And it really is a working guesthouse; you can book a room there.
After we wandered the weird, quasi-creepy compound long enough to build up a sufficient amount of nightmare fuel, we over-ordered lunch at a small restaurant, ate as much as we could, then wandered down to the lake, which is a significant fixture in town. We ambled the afternoon away, walking past workers in conical bamboo hats, half-completed structures for the upcoming flower festival, and the usual unending stream of traffic. After circumnavigating about two-thirds of the lake, I suggested we stop for coffee (a recurring theme on this trip) before getting a taxi back to the hotel.
That evening, we had dinner at Artist Alley, a cute restaurant up the street from our hotel, followed by cold beers and people watching at a bar around the corner. This was less comfortable than it sounds since we sat outside in the cold the whole time. The temperature in Dalat consistently remained about equal to a very cold day in San Francisco, so we layered up as best we could and even bought cheap, colorful gloves from a shop in town for 40,000 dong (less than $2). I love those gloves. Almost as much as I love being able to say the word dong.
The next day was our canyoning adventure, which was content-heavy enough to warrant its own post. Read that first, then come back here. I’ll wait.
Thankfully, the best bathroom of the trip – by far – was in our hotel in Dalat, because we each took long, hot showers upon returning. After a small bit of lazy time to snack on coconut-covered peanuts and watch Vietnamese music videos starring incredibly effeminate “men”, we set out for the evening. First, a Vietnamese coffee (of course) at a wine bar up the road, then across the street to An Cafe for pho and spring rolls and a view of the sunset.
We walked to the night market and gawked at tables of strawberries and seedless avocados and other produce, racks of sweaters and coats, and disorganized mounds of shoes, all the while trying to avoid being hit by the motorbikes navigating the crowds of shoppers. Laurie haggled with a shop owner for some clothes, then we went off in search of food.
We ended up at V Cafe, a Western-style restaurant, for dinner and a wholly unexpected helping of festiveness. The food was good, nothing special really, but I found myself having flashbacks to the holidays of my childhood; the feeling in the restaurant was like a patchwork of dozens of individual Christmas memories. Images of my parents’ house, my aunt’s house, and the restaurants my family went to on Christmas Eve all combined into a Franken-memory that materialized in front of me as a warm restaurant with coffee and cake, red linen tablecloths, Christmas songs being played on a keyboard, dark wood furniture, candles on the tables, a Christmas tree lit up in the corner, and people bundled up in hats and scarves coming in from the cold. And just when I started to think that maybe I had been magically transported back home, I noticed the red Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling, which were just enough to remind me where I actually was.
After dinner, we walked up the street to visit the last place on our must-see-in-Dalat list: 100 Roofs Cafe, a drinking establishment cut from the same architectural cloth as the Crazy House. The many floors of the building are each connected by multiple staircases, the rooms are all full of weird shit, and they give you drinks in exchange for small amounts of money. It’s great.
That seemed like a fitting end to our time in Dalat, so after a couple beers, we packed it in for the night and got up early the next morning for our bus ride to Mui Ne.
Mui Ne
After an uneventful, but picturesque, morning bus ride, we arrived in the early afternoon in Mui Ne, a quiet beach town on Vietnam’s south-eastern coast. (Well, truthfully, we were staying in Ham Tien, which is to the west; the towns have gotten mixed up in travel literature for decades because an early group of foreign travelers to the area misunderstood where they were.) We had a short stay – only a couple nights – because we wanted to have more time in Saigon. Two nights ended up being perfect since there wasn’t much to do but relax. Beach erosion is really bad in the area and there was actually no beach at all during our stay, so that limited our activities to eating, sleeping, reading, and getting massages, which is exactly what we did for two days.
Ham Tien is really just a single road running parallel to the water lined with hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops catering to tourists. Like some other places in Asia I’ve been to, there’s even a small Russian part of town, where most of the signage and most of the tourists are Russian. A lot of worthwhile places were relatively close to our hotel, so most of the time we walked. Hundreds of taxis run along the road all day every day, so getting one when we needed one (or didn’t need one) was very easy.
Seafood BBQ is definitely the food of choice whenever you’re in a place like this and we happily sat down to a first night feast of spring rolls, morning glory, scallops, and grilled fish. After dinner, we settled into comfy couches at a bar down the street and I introduced Laurie to shisha while we both took in the scene of drunk party boys and over-dressed Russian party girls.
The next evening we gorged ourselves on amazing Indian food at Ganesh; for me, it was the best meal of Vietnam. I had so much Goa fish curry and chana masala and rice and naan and lassi that I didn’t eat again for 24 hours.
After dinner: a long walk to burn some calories, a nightcap at a new rooftop bar, a good night’s sleep, a quick swim in the pool the next morning, and a 45-minute taxi ride to the train station. Our time in Mui Ne was brief but very pleasant. Onward to Saigon!
