From Saigon to mountains of Dalat

IT was Tuesday, June 8, at around 2.30pm that I got off the bus I had caught in Phnom Penh that very morning.

A little over six hours to reach Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon, one of the biggest cities in Southeast Asia (more than seven million people), and the one that witnessed the last stages of probably one of the most vicious wars of the last century, the so-called Vietnam War (1955-1975).

Saigon is a mixture of Bangkok and Phnom Penh, crowded, sprawling, noisy, with the worst traffic I've seen so far, which makes Phnom Penh look like a small country town in comparison. In spite of this, Saigon has a few interesting things to see, which made my three-day stay worth it, two days in the actual city and one outside.

In the city I walked around the centre, in the modern area around Dong Khoi and Hai Ba Trung streets, which has some nice historical sights like the Municipal Theatre, the Hotel de Ville (the former town hall) and the Notre Dame Cathedral, all legacies of the French era. However, what I found particularly interesting were the Reunification Palace built in 1966 in a beautiful 1960s' modern style, and the War Remnants Museum nearby. Both are testimonies of the recent history of Vietnam. In fact, the Reunification Palace was the residence of the President of South Vietnam, and it was there that the Vietnam War ended when a North Vietnamese tank smashed through its gate on the 30th of April 1975. On the other hand, the War Remnants Museum shows the most horrible aspects of that long war, among which the pictures of some of the thousands of children that were born deformed on account of the Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide that the Americans spread from the sky in huge quantities to defoliate the forests that were protecting the North Vietnamese troops. This is the terrible legacy of a war that claimed the death of around two million civilians.

And in Saigon, too, I bumped into people I knew! In one case it was a nice young couple of Estonians who had travelled with me on the boat from Siem Reap to Battambang, whereas the other case was even more surprising and an amazing coincidence — in the garden of the Reunification Palace I met by chance a student from UBD!

One morning I also took a local bus to get to Cholon, the busy Chinatown of Saigon, to visit a few Chinese temples, whereas on the last day I was there I signed up for a tour around the Mekong Delta, less than 100km south of Saigon. I really enjoyed sailing along the narrow canals surrounded by thick vegetation and then on the Mekong itself ... difficult to believe that this huge river was only perhaps 100m wide in Luang Prabang!

On Saturday the 12th I took a bus for Dalat, my next destination. As I noted at the beginning, I had already realised that the traffic in Saigon was the worst I had come across since the beginning of my journey (to the point that crossing the road was sometimes a real feat), but I wasn't prepared to the crazy and dangerous driving of the bus driver. I think it is a miracle he didn't kill anybody, particularly motorcycle drivers, during the seven-hour trip to Dalat.

I wasn't even able to enjoy the beautiful landscape of the mountains around because of this driver's vicious overtaking (most of the time he was in the middle of the road or driving in the wrong direction) and continuous deafening hooting.

Anyway, I arrived in one piece even though under torrential rain. In fact, the first of the three days I've spent here I could hardly walk around because of the rain ... and the temperature is quite low, too, around 20 degrees! Dalat lies at almost 1,500m above sea level, and its climate feels more European than South-east Asian.

Yesterday, on the other hand, the weather looked better, and I had arranged to be taken around by a local motorbike rider/mini tour operator. So good to get out of town and explore the beautiful countryside!

After a first stop to visit the temple of Linh Quang with its impressive giant statue of a dragon in the garden, we rode on to the village of Lat, inhabited by the ethnolinguistic minority with the same name. After that we reached the foot of the Lang Biang mountain, 12km northwest of Dalat, and from there a jeep took me and other six Vietnamese tourists to the top at 2,200m.

When we got there it was cold, rainy and we couldn't see anything as we were shrouded in big clouds. We were lucky, though — half an hour later the clouds cleared and we were finally able to enjoy a magnificent view of the mountains around, Dalat in the distance on one side and a beautiful lake just in front.

After Lang Biang we rode back to the outskirts of Dalat to visit the Flower Gardens, and then we reached the cable car station from where I descended for 8km towards the village of Trai Mat, hanging high above the woods surrounding Dalat. In Trai Mat I visited the Linh Phuoc pagoda (Buddhist temple) and then I walked down as far as placid Lake of Sighs.

Then I was picked up by my motorbike driver and went to see the Datanla Falls, not far from there. After the nice but rather crowded waterfalls (which can also be reached by a kind of jungle roller coaster), we headed back to Dalat to see my last and possibly most interesting sight of the day — the so-called Crazy House, a wonderful house looking like coming straight from a fairy-tale, designed by the Vietnamese architect Dang Viet Nga, similar to some of Gaudi's masterpieces, for those who know the great Catalan architect. I finished the visit of the main sights this morning with Bao Dai's Summer Palace no.3, one of the residences of the last emperor of Vietnam.

Well, I'll be leaving again, this time onwards to Hoi An.

The Brunei Times