Happy Tet

Have a happy Tet and much luck in the year of the tiger.

Easy Riding near Dalat

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

Hiking Pinhatt Mountain

This week we went to Dalat for three nights. It's a small city originally founded as a retreat by French colonists, and it is refreshingly cool there. It's in the central highlands about 300 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, but at a much higher elevation, with dramatic valley drops and beautiful scenery. The cool temps can be deceptive, though -- it's still a tropical sun up there and wears on you.

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

Cam Ly Airfield

This is the remains of Cam Ly Airfield, a hilltop runway a few kilometers from Dalat that was the drop point for U.S. troops operating in this area after 1968. Our motorcycle guides took us by here on our tour of the countryside.

-Robert

Ups and downs in Dalat

We returned last night from an eventful trip to Dalat. I want to tell about our hike in the mountains and the motorbike tour, but recovery is going to take awhile. In the meantime, check out the pictures here, and please check back.


-Robert

The most expensive bowl of pasta ever

The other day, I accepted a challenge from friends to make a dinner of American food in our apartment. The first problem with that was the limits of the kitchen -- no oven, a propane camp stove that I didn't know how to turn on, and no pots, pans or anything else larger than a saucer, no cutting board, no counter space, and no way to communicate at the markets. The second problem is my limited repertoire. I like making desserts -- in an oven. And it's been more than 10 years since I made any kind of chicken, beef or pork dish. When I cook fish, it's usually on the grill.

So, brainstorming what I could make on a stovetop with minimal complication with ingredients I could buy here and that might taste plausibly foreign to our Vietnamese guests, I settled on pasta, which I was able to buy at great expense at a market here that specializes in "gourmet" import food. They also had sauce in a jar, but I was pretty sure no one would be impressed with that, and I didn't have the gear for a homemade sauce. So I decided on tossing it with olive oil (again, not easy to find) and pan fried fresh Mekong River shrimp that I marinaded in cajun spice, which I found in the import market, along with cilantro and bell peppers. I found some really good looking Parmesan, but it was being sold by the gram, so I decided on a bland feta cheese. There were no greek olives, so we settled on cocktail olives with pimento. Desert was Pepperidge Farm cookies, which I think really are almost like homemade.

The whole affair was a reminder that travel is the art of compromise. Can you see from the picture that I'm using an aluminum teapot to cook the pasta in?

The one thing that wasn't a compromise was the bread. I found a bakery here that is the real deal. (Schneider's on Pasteur across from the palace, if you're in the neighborhood.)

The whole thing took me about five different shopping trips over a few days, and the least expensive ingredient was the kilo of shrimp.

This was actually an "iron chef" kind of party, and after the pasta (which our guests picked at very politely), Tuan prepared fried spring rolls and all the fixings.

Which was familiar territory, but he did introduce us to one new item -- a kind of soft drink prepared on the spot with a syrup from tamarind juices, mixed with hot water, then poured over ice and the chewy pits of tamarind and sprinkled with peanuts. It was very sweet and tasty. I wish I had gotten the name of it.

This wasn't even the most exciting part of the evening. Don't ask about the plumbing disaster that unfolded in the middle of it all. I'll just say that washing the dishes was also a reminder that travel is the art of compromise.

-Robert