December 17th-22nd, 2024
I flew northeast from Ho Chi Minh City to a small city
called Dalat, to relax and
check out a recommendation from a fellow paragliding pilot in Canada who
recently got engaged to a Vietnamese student of mine. His advice was to visit the “Crazy House”. Sounded good to me.
Ready for takeoff in Ho Chi Minh City.
Bye bye HCMC.
An immediate thing I noticed in Dalat was its temperate weather,
much different to most of Vietnam’s tropical climate. It was a refreshing change.
I’m staying in Dalat for five nights in the Red House Hotel,
the longest I’d stayed in one accommodation on this whole Southeast Asia
trip. Naomi and I stayed 5 nights in
Chiang Mai, but we changed from a hotel to a resort during that time. My plan was to catch up on some blogging and
more importantly do some bookkeeping for my paragliding business. It’s that time of the year and my books are
due near the end of the month.
After checking into the hotel around 7:30 pm, I took a walk
to the ATM to get some cash and then find a place to eat as I found out that
there was no restaurant at the hotel, which was falsely advertised on
Booking.com. Finding dinner was more
challenging than I would have liked. All
I could find were tiny local places, most of them empty of clientele, and none
of them looked inviting or their food enticing.
In the end I bought a “banh mi” (a sandwich) from a teenage girl who had
a little trolley beside her family’s convenience store. It was pretty good, but quite spicy. I hope I can find something better tomorrow
as I can’t be eating banh mi for the next five days.
My lovely dinner on the first night.
The first two days I was pretty much a hermit, working on my
computer, although I did wander out and spend half of an afternoon in a cool,
flower or plant looking coffee shop, but on day 3, which was a Friday, I decided
it was time to do some activities.
The coffee shop.
Searching on the web, I found another tourist attraction
other than the Crazy House that I wanted to check out, and that was the Datanla
Alpine Coaster. It’s a 2400-meter coaster
track (supposedly the longest in Asia) through a forest where you ride on a
sled and simply have a handle to apply the brake…if you want…
I bought my ticket and then watched who was entering the
line-up. I was hoping that the person in
front of me wasn’t going to be a slowpoke, so I was “profiling” people. I saw a couple amble into the queue and
figured the guy looked young enough that he would go fast, so I joined the
line. A couple of their friends then
caught up with them, two women, and I thought I’d blown it as they were going
to be on the sled in front of me.
I hopped in my sled, tried to delay my departure as long as
I could to get some space between us, and to my happy surprise, the ladies in
front were givin’er. Near the end of the
first half of the ride, it was the boyfriend ahead of them who caused us all to
slow down.
Reaching the bottom of the hill, I could see a straight line
of the track going up an incline to climb the adjacent hill…there was more to
come!
You weren’t supposed to use your cell phone while on the ride,
but I saw others doing it (granted they were the front rider in the two-person
sled who didn’t have a brake to worry about), but I surreptitiously pulled the
phone out and tried to film some of the adventure. I didn’t do the greatest job, so here’s a link to a good video of the
ride that someone else took.
At the bottom of the second hill, I reached an exit area, so
I hopped out of the sled. I knew that
the park had some waterfalls, but I didn’t realize that you could get to them
by taking the alpine coaster or you could walk there if you didn’t go on the
ride. They were nice falls, and I walked
up some stairs and along a trail to see another set of waterfalls before
returning to get back on a sled.
The ride back wasn’t quite as exciting as it was two up sections
with just one coast down the hill in between…still better than walking back!
I took a Grab through some pine wood forests, back to town, to visit the Crazy House. This strange set of buildings with a few whimsical themes was designed and built by an architect, Dr. Dang Viet Nga, between 1990 and 2010.
There are some rooms that you can stay in, which not
surprisingly look like they’re out of a fairy tale. However, I think the majority of visitors are
like me and just come to wander around and enjoy the strange staircases, wacky
windows and bizarre buildings.
I had another full day of bookkeeping done in Dalat before it was time for the next destination, a city on the coast called Nha Trang. On the bus I sent a message to Dan, with a few of my photos from the Crazy House and thanking him for the recommendation. He responded back asking if I had visited the clay sculpture park outside of town by a lake. I quickly Googled it and saw that I missed a very interesting looking spot…damn. Check it out here. Somehow it never came up in my research. Oh well, you can’t do it all…
No comments:
Post a Comment