Dalat is known for its floral gardens and it exports beautiful flowers as well as vegetables, milk, and other agricultural and forest products: lumber and wood products such as carved furniture and bamboo. This year Dalat is celebrating its 120th Anniversary but the civilization of the area is older going back several thousands of years. There are various ethnic groups in the area with their unique farming techniques, music, arts, dance and languages. One of our thrills was going to a cultural presentation by a singing and dance troupe that performed Saturday night at the resort where we had our rooms. The group did not just sing and dance though that would have been enough but spoke to us about their history and their love of their Vietnam home. But more about that later.
We arrived in Dalat on
Friday morning of September 29th at
5:30am and a van from the bus company transported us to our resort
where we stowed our luggage and took a nap until about 9am when it
was time to "get up and go." We had a delicious breakfast at the
dining room of the resort --- Soup for me and bun for the others.
Then we toured the grounds of the resort which includes two
performance pavilions, various museums highlighting the culture of
the area from weaving to wine making, farming, flower production (we
bought an exquisite orchid as a gift for our Dean), and lots of
statues to do with the astrological signs.
Year of the Dragon catcher. |
| Here is a beautiful picture of two local ladies, Vinh and Leanna. The women asked to have a picture with Leanna because they were all grandmothers! |
When we got to the big pavilion we found that the troupe was practicing their songs and performance materials so we watched and talked with them. They invited us to take a few licks on their instruments and we did.
When the rain increased we went back to our rooms for a rest
before heading for downtown Dalat which was about 6K away. As it
turned out after we got up about 2pm we walked downtown passing all
sorts of small businesses, a garment factory where we noticed the
canteen run by the union for the workers, both new and old houses
some with an art deco architecture from the last part of the French
colonial period. As we approached Dalat University we came upon a
family running their business on the street – they were preparing
deep fried bananas, corn and sweet potatoes so we sat down and got a
big platter of all three and enjoyed out lunch – delicious! After
we finished our sidewalk lunch we continued our walk toward downtown
passing Dalat University, some road construction, dormitories and a
fancy golf course.
Then we proceeded down a long hill and arrived at a large flower garden and across the street was a lovely little lake. As it turned out, the large flower garden was closed for the day, boo hoo. So we changed destinations and decided to head for the central market and do some shopping. To reach it we had to travel alongside the lake and to do that we rented a horse drawn quite fancy carriage that carried us to the south end of the Lake. The carriages are often rented by lovers or newly weds who come to Dalat and visit the Valley of Love. At the south end of the lake we had to start our walk again, another half mile or so to the Dalat Market where we enjoyed shopping and stopped and had atiso tea and coffee at a little coffee bar featuring a locally grown highland coffee. FYI Atiso tea is tea from dried artichoke and is reportedly a good natural medicine for your GI track, blood pressure, cholesterol, gall and other things. Then it was dark out and time to head home to our rooms to get some sleep.
Saturday morning we were up early and took breakfast a little after 7am again at the dining room of the resort looking out over a beautiful farming and wooded valley. On the other side of the valley low clouds covered the hills swirling about the peaks. A very peaceful way to enjoy a breakfast soup. And by a little after 8am we were picked up by our tour bus for our day of exploring several sites around Delat. Thankfully, it was not raining and we got through most of the day without getting rained on although in the later afternoon the daily rain came along for a while.
The first stop on the tour was the Summer Palace of the
last King of Vietnam, King Bao Dai who was the monarch in the 30s and
40s until the end of WW2 ended French colonial rule. The King soon
took his family to France where he lived for many years. The palace
was a fine specimen of French colonial architect built in the 30s
with many art deco aspects. The King's first wife lived in this
Summer Palace with her children and the other 7 wives had their own
palaces --- he did not mix and match with his wives and children.
After finishing at the Palace our tour guide and driver took us to a Buddhist Meditation Center designed by the same architect who designed the Unification Palace, the fortress built with US money for the right wing dictators installed after the partition of the nation in 1956 by the perfidy of the US and the Catholic Church and that stands now as a symbol of the liberation of the nation and the reunification after the defeat of the US military. The Meditation Center and gardens are a peaceful place even with hundreds of tourists there at the same time. One room contained a giant jade Buddha that is magnificent.
When we finished touring the Meditation Center we walked down to the edge of a lake where we boarded boat #19 to go out to an Island a few kilometers across lake. The lake waters were clean, fish jumped and birds and frogs were in evidence.
The tour guide had said
that on the Island that we were going to we could ride an elephant if
we wanted to and like sure, why not ride an elephant? It had to be
much like riding a horse or a merry-go -round, right. Well it was
and it wasn't. You don't put your foot in a stirrup and swing
yourself up on to your ride --- rather you climb a tower, the handler
brings his elephant to the side of the tower and you climb into the
box and you are ready to go. Now elephants can run quite fast but
our handler, Pham, only let our elephant, Roc, walk while
we were on board. When elephants walk slowly
they rock and roll a lot but when I asked if Rock has fallen down the handler
said that elephants don't fall down.
The view from an elephant is different than a horse, too. First you are close to higher limbs on trees and small trees and bushes are below you. Roc occasionally stopped to grab some plants he wanted to eat and the handler would have to tell him to get going. Incidentally, the handler who rode on the elephants neck did not hit or act abusive toward his friend. Whenever a trip would finish Roc got a reward of three stocks of sugar cane --- to get the cane he ran from the tower to the cane storage. When he ran he moved at a very smooth quick pace and as far as I could see the rock and roll pretty much disappeared. Rock carried his cane around in his trunk and with some in his mouth as he chomped away. When he finished one piece then he would deftly move another piece into his jaws and eat while walking along.
I don't believe that
Leanna or I ever expected to ride an elephant but there you go. If
you get a chance, don't pass it up! We boated back across the lake where we met our
van and driver and went off to another temple to view the tallest
Buddha in Dalat and the province at 22 meters. After this visit to
the temple we had lunch at a cafe downtown by the central market and then visited the National Heritage Railroad Station. Our food included a nice pork and noodle preparation, atiso soup,
cafe, and rice. Delicious. The picture above right is of one of the train engines from the period before the US destroyed the railroad with bombing during the American War. Dalat still does not have rail service.Then it was off to visit a flower shop at the site of a large flower grower. The flowers for sale were spread over several rooms and included paintings/tapestries made of dry flowers as well as the live flowers for sale. The dry flower art works were said to last for five or ten years but we decided not to try to carry such things in our luggage – we would get home with flower crumbs. When we finished at the flower shop we had one more stop on our tour but we had the guide drop us off at our near by resort since it was raining fairly hard and steady by this time.
It seemed like a wonderful time to catch some sleep and the three of us took a nap. After maybe an hour we were awoken by a booming drum and decided the concert by the dance and song troupe must be on even with the rain. Before 7pm we trooped down to the theatre and since we were early had our choice of seats and sat back for others to arrive and for the show to start.
The
program opened after a short speech with two people being called out
of the audience to light a bonfire, this is a pantheistic culture and
fire is one of the gods, in the middle of the stage. To my
astonishment I was called out and I looked around at first to make
sure that this was true even after Leanna and Vinh said that I
should go out on the stage. After we were standing on the stage for
some time with the moderator or production director by the stacked
wood that was seasoned with kerosene or some other burning fluid, two
women brought out burning torches and shared them with the
volunteers. The women held the torches with us and we stepped to the
wood pile and lit it up. As the fire burned a dance started around
it and people came down out of the audience to join us as we circled
the blaze. There were more dances as the evening progressed and in
almost every instance the audience was drawn into the performance ---
a brand new caring community growing before our eyes and through our
feet. Another dance that was wild and enjoyable was a dance of water
buffalo. The picture below shows the performance area but was shot in the day time. Unfortunately the night time pics didn't take well, it was dark and I didn't want to use flash.
QED
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