Dalat

Another stretch on the North-South coast of Vietnam was completed by our bus ride from Nha Trang to Dalat, the place of eternal spring, as locals call it. And it is really very much different from the rest of the country we have seen; it is 1475 m above the sea level with a cool climate, beautiful mountains and lakes and a highly organized agriculture full of greenhouses. It is a famous honeymoon spot for locals, and in general seems like the former French hill station made itself a famous local tourist attraction. The city of Dalat itself did not especially impress us with its hundreds of hotels mushrooming next to each other with very little creativity other than copying the neighbor's business, but the surrounding countryside is really worth the effort.

We decided to rent a scooter and drive to Lang Bien Mountain for a trek and climb to the 2170 m peak. We had a lovely spring day with small fat clouds floating in the blue sky, beautiful evergreen forest, red soil, 4 bananas and a bottle of water in our bag, wild horses gazing at us on an ideally 3-4 hours return trek. All was like in a fairy tale - though a bit more sweaty - until the macadam road ended and changed into a narrow path leading into the depth of the rain forest. The familiar pine tree forest changed into a full jungle so dense, that you had to make your way with your arms to get through the diverse fauna of a totally unknown forest for a European eye. We had 4 km behind us and another 2 to get to the peak, when we realized that our almost invisible path has been swallowed by the jungle and simply turning back to leave the mountain unmounted led us into a labyrinth of thin traces leading to other thinner paths. We finished our bananas and most of our water, had no watch with us to calculate how much time we have till sunset, when we heard human voices. After a not especially relaxed 1 hour rush to the direction of voices hoping to bump into other than jungle living creatures or at least a signed trek we found a reasonable path with a red arrow pointing uphill. By that time we were ready to leave the place and surely uphill was not a guarantee, but since the voices came from the same direction we started climbing up basically on all four. You cannot imagine my relief when the voices manifested themselves in the form of two little Vietnamese boys, and then another two and finally a big group of boys with one single of them speaking English. As it turned out they also lost their way after 5 hours of climbing, but just before finding us they reached the peak, which was 5 minutes uphill from us. Miracles truly do happen; they turned out to be almost on their way down and offered us help downhill. So we finally mounted the monster and a breathtaking panorama and threatening storm clouds greeted us - not that we could catch our breath anyway. Why would life be simple? Our descend was a good two hours struggle in the tropical rain, but accompanied with Vietnamese songs and all kinds of fruits offered by our little friends, who by the way turned out to be all catholic novices :)))

Of course by the time we reached the village the rain disappeared and the "eternal spring" was in full swing for one more hour, before the moon came up... We were becoming a little bit bored if I can say so, hence our little adventure made us feel alive again. Especially when we found a big bloody bruise on Tomek's foot, without doubt caused by a leech. Luckily I did not have to perform an operation, because it had sucked itself full andw fell by the time we realized the damage. After all I am glad this was the biggest price for our experiment to find out is we are still alive :)