I headed up to Dalat on the 29th, which I soon realised was poor planning on my part. The 29th was my birthday and the prospect of spending 8 hours of it on the bus was not appealing. It turned out to be the best bus ride I've had since arriving in Asia as the seats were comfortable and I actually had leg room. So that was a pleasant surprise. I arrived in the evening to a less pleasant surprise. Dalat was friggin cold! It's up in the mountains, which means the temperature actually dips beneath 10 degrees at night. I know that sounds kinda whiny to some of my Canadian friends still dealing with snow, but when you're used to lows of 35 (read: neener neener neener), 10 is a shock to the system! Luckily I had kept some warm clothes from Europe, and lugging the heavy hoodie and jeans around in my pack for 3 months finally paid off. Carin had left for Dalat the night before, so we ended up meeting up for dinner and she was kind enough to buy me a birthday beer. It was a much more subdued birthday than in previous years, but when I think of all the partying I've been doing on this trip, it's just one more day anyways. The following day I did the easy rider tour of the Dalat country side. This is where a bike driver will take you around the hills and some of the small villages nearby. It turned out to be a great day, and an amazing experience. The views were breathtaking. I could tell something was different in the hills, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I climbed one of them for the view. There's pine trees there! That's how friggin cold it gets, there's pine trees! Anyways, we made lots of cool stops, including a temple, a waterfall, the aforementioned hike up the mountain, a coffee plantation, a rice wine factory, a cricket farm, a flower farm, a silk factory, a “crazy” house designed by an eccentric architect and a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. My driver offered to take me to a dog factory, where they raise, slaughter, skin, and butcher dogs for their meat. As curious as I was, I think I made the right decision in declining. Dalat itself is an aesthetically impressive town. You can really tell the French spent some time here as French villas line the streets and hillsides – a few even still have some bullet holes in them from the war.
I'd had enough of the cold weather, so the following day I took another bus down to Nha Trang. The bus ride was only a few hours, but the views were just as impressive on the way down. We were in the clouds for a while, making visibility tricky at times. But the views were similar to the Amalfi coast bus ride, except instead of the Mediterranean to the right, it was gorgeous valleys and other mountains off in the distance.
Nha Trang was much warmer, which I was happy about. It's a beach down on the coast in the south central part of the country. The weather can be spotty, so you have to take advantage of the sun when you can. The beach itself is nice and very spread out, as opposed to the compressed beach in Sihanoukville. There's also fewer people bugging you to buy things on the beach. However, there are just as many in the streets. I must admit, I reached my breaking point for patience in Nha Trang. Normally I give a friendly no thank you to the touts and moto drivers, but it just gets so tiresome after a while, that it's impossible to stay polite. So now I either ignore them or give them grouchy grunts if they're lucky. One guy kept calling out to me “my friend my friend” but I just kept walking. So he jogged up to me to ask why I didn't want to talk to him. I told him I didn't know he was talking to me and he said “I said 'my friend'”. To which I replied that's why I didn't think he was talking to me, because he's not my friend. He then said “yes, I'm you're friend”, and I responded with “no you're not my friend. You're just another stranger trying to sell me overpriced shit that I don't need. You're the exact opposite of a friend”. Possibly too harsh, but it wears on you, having several dozen similar interaction day after day. The other thing that I must point out is that out of the 3 countries in Asia I've been to, the Vietnamese are the least friendly people from what I've seen. Most other backpackers seem to say the same thing...after having been in Cambodia, Thailand or Laos where people are generally laid back, the Vietnamese people just seem more aggressive. I get stared at constantly and many locals just blatantly point at laugh because of my beard/size combo. It's hard to explain if you haven't been here, but take my word for it...there's just a certain underlying hostility that's there. Not that this isn't a great country – I've been having a blast here. Certainly it's the most scenic I've seen so far. Just another aspect to deal with.
Anyways, back from my rant. I had fun in Nha Trang. Carin ended up making her way over the following day, so we went out for some drinks and made some new friends. We even found a shisha bar, which was a nice blast from the past. I spent my few days there relaxing on the beach when possible and taking in the sights.
After a few days I said my final sad goodbye to Carin and took the sleeper bus up to Danang. This was a less than enjoyable experience. The sleeper bus differs from regular overnight buses in that instead of seats, they have beds. I thought this was a great idea so that I wouldn't have to wrestle for leg room. Turns out they build those to Vietnamese specifications as well...the beds are tiny. I had to lie at an exact angle to have any sort of comfort. And I was on a top bunk in the middle of the bus, which meant that I was always dangerously close to falling off whenever the bus would take a sharp turn, which was quite frequent on the winding roads. There were tiny handle bars on either sides of the bunk, but not nearly enough to make me feel secure. I think I only got a couple hours of sleep, so when I arrived in Danang in the morning, I slept most of the day away. When I finally did get up in the afternoon and explored, I quickly discovered I hadn't been missing much. I was in a crappy part of town and there wasn't a whole lot to see or do. It took me three different restaurants before I finally managed to get somebody to serve me lunch instead of just laugh with other patrons about me. Clearly they don't get a lot of tourists in that area. The only reason I was really there was to catch a flight the next day anyways, so I holed up in my room for the rest of the day and just watched a few movies.
The following morning I got up very early to catch a flight up to Hanoi. When I got to the airport, I wasn't exactly thrilled to learn my flight had been delayed by 3 hours, but that's life on the run I suppose. I ended up meeting a couple cool people and hung out with them for a while. Once I finally arrived in Hanoi I made my way to my hostel where I met up with Kim and Carissa, two of my friends from Sihanoukville. We went out for drinks that night and caught eachother up on our travel stories. Another sign of my waning patience came on our walk to dinner. We were looking at the prices at one menu at a roadside eatery when a guy came up to me, poked me, and said “hello how are you” to me and then went back to his table, giggling with his friend. I kinda snapped and yelled “yeah fucking hilarious! You said hello to a big fat white guy with a beard! It's a barrel of monkeys!” I think it may be time to move on from Vietnam. Unfortunately the following morning I woke up with a bad cold. All of the buses and flights here are terribly over-air conditioned so going from extreme heat to extreme cold tends to wear on the body. So for the last few days I've just been lying low, recovering from the cold. I can't complain too much since this is my first time getting really sick (aside from the occasional Molson flu) since my bout of food poisoning in Italy. It's too bad since I really wanted to spend the time hanging out with Kim and Carissa, but I just haven't had the energy. They're heading to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand for the Thai new year in a couple days, so I decided to meet up with them and make up for missing out here. So that's where I'm heading tomorrow. I'm looking forward to moving on, since I've heard Chiang Mai is beautiful, but I will miss Vietnam, despite all of my complaints. Like I said, aside from all the hassle, it's a nice country.
Here are some pictures from Dalat. I've reached the max capacity for my former Picassa account, so this is a new one if you're keeping track.
Just in case, here's the first account with all of my pictures up until Saigon.
And here's the account from Dalat and whatever else the future holds for me.
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