Since the city has a reputation for being a tourist trap with few sites to keep you busy, our plan was to spend the first two days on side trips into the countryside and use the last morning before our flight home to see the city, but I had a bad case of traveler's tummy that kept me in the hotel the last 24 hours, so we didn't see much of Dalat itself. Luckily we got in our two excursions first.
We stayed at Dreams Hotel, which is recommended in the guidebooks, and that's the second time I've had good luck that way. Owners that are nice and outgoing and helpful make all the difference, and the people at Dreams were terrific. The woman who ran the place with her husband and children and grandchildren had all the flight and bus schedules memorized and seemed to know everyone in town, and she saved us a fortune on a taxi to the airport by calling in a guy she knew.
Our first trip, pictured here, was with Phat Tire, an "adventure tour" company that puts together mountain biking, kayaking and trekking (i.e. hiking) trips. For hikes, they list easy, moderate and difficult trips, and we assumed there was some grade inflation to scare away people who tend to get ahead of themselves, but thank goodness we chose the easy hike, because there was nothing easy about it. It was 14 kilometers total, with plenty of up and down before we started the ascent of Pinhatt Mountain. (No one was ever able to explain the name to us.) The next day I was suffering.
As with other trips we've taken in the past, we had our personal guide for the whole thing and a driver to drop us off and pick us up. The first picture is from the trailhead, overlooking Dalat. The second picture is of a reservoir -- Tuyen Lam Lake -- that we ascended to after a couple hours. It's known as the most beautiful lake in the area, and everywhere we walked we saw the signs of development -- roads cut through the forest for new resorts, big areas cleared for golf courses, billboards advertising the tract housing that will be going in.
The other pictures are approaching the mountain, the ascent and at the top. If you look at the picture from the summit, where we started is on the ridge between the lake the city beyond it.
After so much time in Saigon, the quiet and clean air felt a little unreal. It's the dry season now with no fog and not much in bloom and signs of grass fires everywhere. There are a lot of other pictures that tell the rest of the tale in the slide show on the right -- our guide, Minh, preparing a picnic lunch with the supplies he hauled, Ilene feeding an elephant at a park back at the lake, taking a boat across the lake to our pick up point.
Next up, our motorcycle tour around the countryside with the Easy Riders. Check back tomorrow.
-Robert
