Oh Dalat, Je t'aime Dalat, tu es magnifique, vous etes belle et si gentille! Qu'est-ce qu'un moment merveilleux, oh Dalat une ville parfait! There aren't enough superlatives in the English language for this stunning highland town and I've exhausted them all anyway raving about other things - hence I'm resorting to some very ropey and limited French, the language of love, and very applicable in this instance given that Dalat is more French than France. Really though, it is beautiful here, don't go on holiday to Italy or the Canary Islands this summer, buy a plane ticket to Vietnam and stay in Dalat - you won't regret it.
A small, provincial looking town set around a lake and bordered on all sides by the Truong Son mountain range, the matchbox slate-roofed houses are painted in pastel shades of mint green, candy pink and sky blue. The countryside is evergreen and lush, the winding streets snake past bakeries and fishmongers, tailor's workshops, chocolate shops and art galleries. The air smells like roses and petrol and coffee, the town centre has been meticulously and laboriously planned and is dotted all over with fountains, statues and flowerbeds, and the climate is warm without being humid or sweat inducing - like England on a sunny Spring day. Apparently Dalat is prime Vietnamese honeymoon territory, and it's not hard to see why.
Being thankfully without grooms in tow, myself and Ella managed to have us our own little romantic afternoon when we arrived here on Monday. Unbeknown to us before scheduling our Vietnam itinerary back in Saigon, we have happened to be in Dalat on the week of the annual Flower Festival. The whole town looks like a Florist's on Valentine's Day; garlands and bouquets and huge floral sculptures are lining every spare piece of pavement, the wind tastes like carnations. We had a picnic on the grass bank at the side of the lake of sweetbread, Dairylea and beer - we had gone shopping in the Patisserie local to our guest house hoping for baguettes, Brie and red wine but then we remembered that we are supposed to be backpacking travellers and must stop being so frivolous and spoilt. We hired a pedalo shaped like a swan (although Ella wanted the Dolphin one because she said it looked like it could go underwater - we had to have a little chat about the difference between pedalos and submarines) and worked off the cheesy bread and Budweiser by peddling around on the lake for an hour taking in the surrounding scenery. This proved harder than expected seeing as it was the first noteworthy exercise either of us had undertaken in a month and was made doubly difficult by the effects of the alcohol and my appalling steering, we were stranded in the centre of the lake laughing away for some time before Ella's nose turned sun-blush pink and we had to find the strength to manouvere ourselves in to some shade. We petted the ponies in the field next to the pedalo shop who are there to pull the innumerable lovestruck couples around town in kitsch wooden carriages, we sat on the kerb and watched a ballet recital performance by a teenage Vietnamese dance troupe, and then spent the rest of the day pottering around town eating strawberries and trying not to buy Stuff We Don't Need And Can't Carry from the market. That evening we cosied up in woolen socks and hoodies - the temperature here drops rapidly come nightfall, and went for dinner at a restaurant on the lake overlooking a Fireworks display commissioned in honour of the Flower Festival. We may also have had a bottle of Dalat red wine that we had denied ourselves earlier in the day but now thought justifiable considering it's insulating properties on such a chilly evening; you can't argue with science.
Today has been similarly dreamy. The three of us (Hitan from Hainault is back, we obviously did our best to shake him but his face just kept popping up everywhere we went so we've surrendered to the inevitable and adopted him officially) hired Easy Riders - Vietnamese, Harley Davidson driving, perfect English speaking men who take you on a day trip around the mountain range on the back of their motorbikes, stopping off in the local minority villages. We saw the coffee plantations, rice wine producers, strawberry and flower farms, Elephant Waterfalls (so christened because the rock formation at the bottom of the ravine looks like, you guessed it, an elephant), and visited the silk factories where Ella purchased a gorgeous grey silk dressing gown for the pricely sum of $10, oh the lure of the dreaded Stuff We Don't Need And Can't Carry! We also did some mountain trekking which my legs were less than happy about given that I spent most of yesterday throwing them down cliffs. When we reached the top of the hill climb I spun around with my arms spread and circling me, running over the grassy verge and gleefully belted out 'The hills are alive, with the sound of music!'. No sodding part as an extra for me, this time I was full blown Julie Andrews, and I much prefer Maria Von Trapp to Mary Poppins anyway, in your face Mui Ne.
The most thrilling thing about today was again my unadulterated love of motorbike transportation. It was breathtaking, sitting astride a Harley for a few hours racing through the mountains at breakneck speed along the bends and hilly gradients of the road pass with views for miles of unspoilt countryside coloured in like Autumn but lit with Summer sun. Once more, as I have in numerous moments during the last 6 weeks, I felt vividly alive, as though someone had just painted me in after years of living in black and white. The lightning bolt of 'lucky' struck me again, coursing it's electric shocks along my veins. The whole day has been fascinating and beguiling and a pleasingly authentic cultural encounter with the hill tribe people, but more importantly our drivers - Stefan, Titi and Li - were invaluable sources of information. They told us all they could about the war years, the Napalm bombing, the brutality of the soldiers, the devastation to the land, the horror of re-education camps and the facts of living under the Communist government which still graps and suffocates Vietnam in it's iron fist. But I can't write about this now, I'm still digesting everything I have read and learnt about this country's history and I'm just not ready to put pen to paper about it. Not now, but soon.
Oh Dalat Dalat, merci, merci pour tout mon amie. For strawberries and mountains and waterfalls and abseiling, for sweetbread, for silk, for kind-hearted people with motobikes and stories, for red wine and roses and fireworks and ponies, for these are a few of my favourite things and here it's impossible to feel bad.
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