We like Dalat a Lot!

I hope you've all been enjoying your rock 'n roll lifestyle. The only music we hear here is godawful pop music leftover from the 90s (Backstreet's BACK! and they're touring Vietnam. Seriously.) and the music I play on my little Thai Dream guitar.

Other than that everything has been terrible.

I lost my language book in Laos and couldn't find a new one for 10 days of stumbling around with the same few stale phrases mumbling out my mouth in all circumstances. The problem was only compounded upon arrival in Vietnam, knowing literally nothing and finding communication reduced to crude pointing. Even with a new book, subtleties in the tonal pronunciation and regional differences make saying even a few words a difficult endeavor. Getting around is always a confusing ordeal, where locals often gawk at a map of the area and appear more baffled than we are. Everything we want to do is hampered by uncertainty and miscommunication. We rarely know what we're eating at markets.

And it never stopped raining all the way through North Vietnam. It's the dry season so we thought we'd be safe but no, it was cold and raining every day. Sarah bought another sweater and we both had to buy umbrellas. Getting around is easy on the back of a local's motorbike, but in the rain it's a wholly unpleasant experience. Also, people here drive crazily, seemingly blind, using their horn as echolocation. Constant horn blaring and swerving around motorbikes makes sleeping on buses exceedingly difficult. And the distances are so vast in this very lateral country---one bus ride was 20 hours long.

We never have friends for more than 3 days on the road. Everyone must go their separate ways. There are days where we scarcely get a chance to exchange any English at all. We have only occasional access to the news via the television, which has provided us a bleak enough view of flooding and radiation in Japan, civil war in Libya, massive protests in Syria, flash flooding in South Thailand, and near-civil-war in the Ivory Coast. We rarely hear from our friends and generally feel totally disconnected from everyone we know and care about. We've both gotten sick several times, usually chained to the toilet. And now that the sun has finally returned, I'm sunburned.

There. That was all the awful stuff I can think of. It occurred to me that a story without drama, conflict, or strife is scarcely realistic and certainly uninteresting. Also, we thought maybe people had stopped reading 'cause it makes the home life sound "dull and dreary" (the weather forecast here last week). But that's all, awful stuff finished. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

;)

Dalat was amAzing! We arrived late in the evening, snaking through the misty mountain roads until we came upon vast hills illuminated from enigmatic bubbles in the darkness, lighting up the whole countryside: hundreds upon hundreds of luminescent greenhouses lit up the night; a magical sight. To explore this fantastical mountain land, we hired a couple of savvy freelance motorbike tour guides, Viet and Chili, to lug us around to the hip sites in town.

After exploring the beautiful rows of flowers in one of the countless greenhouses, Viet and Chili took us out to the country, with a beautiful vista of the thickly forested mountains and the valley below, where they grow bananas and coffee. The fruit and coffee here are so fresh. We visited a whiskey distillery (abstaining due to a recovering stomach) that doubled as a silk-worm nursery and tripled as a mushroom farm; it also had an adorable little chihuahua puppy, which was difficult to drag Sarah from. But the lure of the waterfall never fails to light a fire under her and we zoomed off to Elephant Falls, so named for the silly cement elephant statues nearby, typical of statue-loving Dalat.

We climbed down the stairs carved into the boulders and marveled at the awesome power of water falling. Then we climbed down into a crevice made by the huge snaking roots of an allegedly 300-year-old tree, where we could stand under the raging waterfall, looking up in awe at its sheer magnitude as our clothes quickly harvested the mist out of the air. Walking to the top of the hill, we found a big red-roofed Pagoda guarded by massive realistic dragons (as realistic as dragons can be). Behind the Pagoda we walked through another gnarly banzai garden and came upon a gargantuan "Happy Buddha" towering over us with rolls of jolly fat and wrinkled eyes frozen in merry laughter.

Chili and Viet then scooted us on over to a silk factory---very fascinating. We witnessed the sleeping larvae in cocoons, which Viet shook, rudely I thought, to prove their slumbering contents. Once mature, nearing awakening, they soak the cocoons in warm water and grab the end of the cocoon, an incredibly fine thread that unravels to about a mile long, and throw it into a spinning machine that wraps 8 threads together and spools them. They have huge automated loom machines that create intricate patterns out of the silk. We saw the exact same pattern being made that Sarah's swishy orange silk pants from Hoi An are made of.

We capped the countryside tour with a visit to a cricket farm, where Sarah played with crickets and baby chickens before she actually ate a fried cricket (with chili sauce, for flavor). Woah.

We enjoyed the fine fun antics of Viet and Chili so much that we opted to explore the city of Dalat with them the next day. We went to sleep early after an exciting night at the weekend market, where the Vietnamese tourists from Saigon crowded around huge piles of everything (clothes, fruit, jewelry, bonzai trees) and glowing toys lit up the night. Viet and Chili arrived bright and early and wheeled us over to the "Dragon Pagoda," where huge statues of dragons, lions, and Buddhas dominated the courtyard, encircled by the snaking serpentine statue of a 50 meter long dragon. We ate soy pudding!

We then visited a museum of embroidery (boring, say you? Think again!). The things these people can do with mere needle and thread are absolutely astounding. They stitched incredibly intricate artwork on the level of detail of realist paintings, some of which were huge floor-to-ceiling forest-scapes with animals and shimmering waterfalls (using shiny thread!).

The hokey hill given the misnomer of The Valley of Love was our next stop, where we saw the culmination of the manicured gardens and statue scene that dominates Dalat. It was a funny place. But it was there, on the hill called a "valley," that Chili serenaded us upon my guitar in classical style, very romantic, and we traded turns rocking out, leaving in laughter, "GUITAR MASTERS!"

After an amazing (but not uncommon) vegetarian buffet lunch, we headed for a view of the brightly colored city (reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro), where the shack leans next to high rise condos and French Chateaus sit pretty beside ornate banzai-filled pagodas. We hopped in a gondola and rode the long cable across the pine forests and villagers below, traversing a surprising distance before arriving at a beautiful pagoda atop a hill, where the gardens were breath-taking (especially after climbing to the top).

Last thing, and it's worth it: CRAZY HOUSE. It's been described as Antoni Gaudí on acid but this hardly begins to describe the bubbling organic flow of this giant gnarly termite-mound-esque labyrinth. The entire place is a maze of sinuous stairways and arching bridges in and around the bulbous building, with flairs of eccentric style at every turn. The whole place is a[n expensive] hotel and each room has its own quirky theme: bamboo, bear, tiger, eagle, termite, etc. It was a very disorienting and magical place.

And I'd say the same of Dalat: a disorienting and magical place.

Photos coming soon - computers in Vietnam not so good today!