The guidebooks recommend an outfit in Dalat called Easy Riders, a co-op of motorcycle riding tour guides that all wear the same blue and red jackets and hang out at a cafe across from the Dreams Hotel and, as is customary with any successful enterprise here, have their brand diluted by copycats. Did we get genuine Easy Riders? Impossible to know for sure. But we did feel like we got good guides and a good bargain. We hired a pair of buddies at $23 each for the day, got on the back of their Hondas and set off in to the countryside.Actually, I think we might have got special treatment, either because we were lucky in our choice of guides or because, like everyone else in Dalat, they were charmed by Ilene. Outside of downtown Saigon, people are quite taken by her ability to speak Vietnamese. Before long, all the tour was being conducted in Vietnamese, and I wasn't learning much of anything. They have a standard route to different sites in the countryside, and at the first couple stops we saw other Easy Riders and their passengers, but before long we we popping into visit families our guides knew. We stopped at one wooden house along the highway on a hunch that the family there would be making a special meal in preparation for Tet. They were not, and they looked annoyed when we showed up in the doorway to interrupt their lunch, but our guide announced, "She speaks Vietnamese!" (I understand that much Vietnamese myself.) And they had a long conversation about how this miracle occurred.
Our primary destination was Elephant Falls (pictured below), which was beautiful and powerful (and this is in the dry season.) We stopped at some neat temples, a strawberry farm, a coffee farm, to tour a silk factory, to visit a guy who makes silk worm nests, another guy who makes brooms, flower farms (one of the primary products of the area), and an abandoned U.S. military airstrip.
The area is beautiful but is unfortunately marred by the sight and smell of trash fires and random roadside garbage dumping. The Vietnamese we talk to about these and other social ills, like the traffic, always express annoyance at their fellow citizens. The bad behavior is "in the culture" they say, and people need to be educated about correct behavior. Our guides were a couple of old-timers who had seen a few things, and it's always interesting to talk to those guys about life in Dalat over the last 60 years. I think it's better if I save that for another time, though.
-Robert
