Dalat, Vietnam

Dalat is in the highlands of the Vietnam and is home to crops of all kinds. Driving throughout the countryside there is a cascade of greens, and even in the cities, crops fill in every open space between concrete and asphalt. I already mentioned that Vietnam is the #1 rice producer in the world, and you might be interested to know that it is also the #2 producer of coffee (behind Brazil and in front of Colombia). These highlands are where most of that coffee is grown.

While coffee grown in Vietnam is shipped all over the world, drinking coffee in Vietnam is an experience all on it’s own. Traditionally, Vietnamese coffee is brewed extra extra strong and mixed with condensed milk. It’s thick, creamy, sweet, and actually delicious – especially iced on a particularly hot day (and that’s coming from two black coffee drinkers!). You can order your coffee black, but in many places in Vietnam if you order “black” coffee, they bring you a highly sweetened cup of coffee with no milk. They seem to see the “black” as opposed to “white” (milky), with sugar being in a completely separate category – generally assuming it’s something everyone would want.

Of all the experiences I’ve had with actual black, no sugar coffee in Vietnam, I must admit – I’ve often had to water it down. Kirk and I both appreciate a bold cup of coffee and are fond of sipping on a shot of espresso, but the coffee here is brewed so thick that it’s nearly a syrup. It drips off the spoon slowly and has a strong flavor of chocolate. If you order a cup of black (sugared or not) coffee, they bring out an approximately 8 oz cup that is about a third of the way full. We’ve become accustomed to ordering the coffee iced. It’s exceptionally hot in most of Vietnam right now and this way, they bring out a bucket of ice alongside the third a cup of coffee, so you can water it down and cool it off as much as you need to. The strong chocolate flavor stays even after the ice is added, so it turns out to be a pretty tasty drink. Below is a picture of how they brew coffee.

They use a filter that is two parts – the cup on top has exceptionally tiny holes in the bottom and is placed on a plate with exceptionally small holes. What you get is a filter that does out one slow drop at a time, giving the coffee a long time to soak in the flavor – hence that extra strong. Kirk waited about 20 minutes for it to finish!

Here’s a picture of some coffee plants we drove by on one of our excursions.

The tree on the left is not coffee, though I’m unsure what it is (we thought maybe avocado?) You can also see rows of crops growing behind. This area was so green!

Coffee aside, we actually went to Dalat to do some hiking in the cooler temperature mountains – we ended up not doing this, but to call our trip eventful might be an understatement.

The trip to Dalat was an event in and of itself. We booked an overnight bus and if you follow us on Facebook or Instagram you’ve already seen a video of this experience. 13 hours on a bus where foreigners weren’t particularly welcome (we watched as a German mother and daughter were asked to move to the back of the bus from their assigned seats because the “front is reserved for Vietnamese” and as bottled water was intentionally only handed out to Vietnamese individuals). 13 hours on a bus with blaring music through the night (often Vietnamese techno music). 13 hours on a bus with an inattentive, rude, and careless driver (he watched television while driving, took the mountains curves at alarming speeds, and worst of all – smoked cigarettes the entire ride on a bus where the windows were sealed shut). We slept little and arrived in Dalat ready to nap. Even with that, the bus ride pales in comparison to our next experience in Dalat.

We only had two full days in the city, and the first ended up being a coffee and milk tea drinking/blog writing day due to bad weather. We planned on getting up early the morning of the second day to go visit some waterfalls in the area before the rain came again.

We got in bed and went to sleep, but at some point in the night I woke up and realized we hadn’t set an alarm for the morning. I told myself it would be fine (because I didn’t want to have to find my phone and set it) and drifted back to sleep. As I should have realized, not setting alarm only made me anxious, so I ended up waking up constantly through the night, my body always thinking it must be morning. After waking up more times than I can count, I decided it must be close to morning and opened my eyes to check the time.

I was laying on my side facing in towards Kirk so as I opened my eyes I had a clear shot to the end of the bed where two of our backpacks were located. I opened my eyes, and saw something move. I felt confused – am I so tired that I think my bag is moving? I tried harder to focus and the picture slowly came together. There was a man at the end of our bed.

It’s amazing how fast and slow your thoughts move when you’ve just woken up. In the next two seconds I had a stream of crazy confused thoughts – the effects of just having come out of dream world.

“Why are the cleaning people here so early? Why did they come in without knocking? Wait, it’s still dark outside – they wouldn’t be here. Is there some kind of event going on. Fire drill? No. Did we forget we were supposed to be somewhere and they’ve come to get us? Wait, we didn’t tell anyone we were planning on going early. That is a man isn’t it? It is. But how could he have gotten in if he doesn’t work here? The door is closed. I’m the one who locked it, I know I did. He has on a hood. He has a “pollution mask” over his mouth and nose – it’s like he’s hiding his face. He’s in all black. Wait, we left the window open. Wait, is he robbing us? He is hunched over. He is digging through our bags. There is a man in our room digging through our bags. I have to tell Kirk.”

The next five seconds were a blur that Kirk helped fill in the details about later. Suddenly terrified I touched Kirk, who was in a dead sleep, and loudly said, “Kirk, there is a man in our room digging through our bags.” (I’m still shocked at how articulate I was in that moment! I didn’t realize exactly what I has said until I asked Kirk later!) As soon as the words came out of my mouth the man’s face turned towards mine and looked me in the eye – his eyes being the only part of his body you could see. I immediately turned my attention back to Kirk to make sure he had heard me, and saw that he had lifted his head and had the strangest expression on his face – a mix of confusion and determination. The next thing I remember was the sound of a loud thump, as I saw Kirk’s feet following his body out the window. I later learned that that first thing Kirk had seen when he lifted his head was the man going out the window (the man was so fast I never saw him leave!). Instinctively Kirk lunged at him, diving through the open window onto the balcony of our second floor room. I heard movement and Kirk screaming for brief moment before Kirk crawled back inside and went straight downstairs to tell the person on duty.

The guy on night shift spoke no English, but came up with Kirk to try and figure out what he was saying. I pulled out my phone, looked down at my hands, and realized how intensely I was shaking. It took some time, but I got google translate pulled up and typed in “We woke up and a man was in our room digging through our things.” The guy looked concerned and followed as Kirk took him out onto the balcony and showed him the man’s path. Eventually the guy went back downstairs and came back up with bandaids and a phone with a person from the hotel on the line who spoke English. It was at this moment I realized that Kirk was bleeding. He’d gotten pretty scraped up from forcing his body out the window – a six inch scrape down his arm, what later turned out to be an enormous welp on his leg, and a small cut on his thumb. Kirk took the phone from the man explained what had happened to the person on the line before our helper went back downstairs. As Kirk started to doctor his wounds we began our debriefing session. I was shocked at how quickly Kirk had responded to my waking him and asked how he connected things so quickly. It felt like it took my brain forever to catch up to what was happening.

The arm scrape

Kirk replied that 2 hours earlier, at 2 am, he’d woken up to go to the bathroom and had the thought that it would be possible for someone to break in through our window because of the balcony. He almost closed the window then, but ultimately decided not to (we didn’t have a/c, so it was our source of cool). At that same time he had moved his iPad from his backpack (the one the man was digging through) to next to the bed so that he could use it in the morning. (Though we weren’t sure until much later, it turns out that nothing was taken – I’m not sure that would have been the case if the iPad hadn’t have been moved). Kirk said that when I woke him up it was already on his mind, so it clicked easily. Kirk instinctively followed the guy.

Kirk went on to tell me that as he lunged towards the window, he touched the guys jacket, but just missed him. From the balcony Kirk watched as this tiny fast ninja man slithered from one balcony to the next, over a building, and down a sign attached to the other side of the building (that might as well have been a ladder). Kirk said he came so close to following the man that Kirk found himself standing on the banister of the balcony before fully waking up and realizing everything that had just happened, including the fact that man was uncatchable by that point – the guy had clearly done this many times.

I remembered Kirk screaming and asked – “What was it you screamed at him?”

Kirk laughed and replied, “I think I said, ‘I will beat your a**!'”

Suddenly the distinct memory of my pacifist’s husband voice screaming at the top of his lungs, “I will beat your a**!” came flooding back to my mind. We both laughed. You never know how you will react in a situation like that until you are there.

We stayed up for a while discussing as new and somewhat terrifying realizations came to mind.

“Wait. our bed is 6 inches from the window and blocks the whole thing. He climbed over us without waking us to get in.”

“Here are footprints on the bed”

Footprints on the bed

“Here are footprints on the window seal”

“This room is tiny. He was so close I could have kicked him”

“He had to have watched us sleep, he didn’t come in without first looking. He sat in that window and watched…”

“He knew exactly what he was doing. This was not his first time.”

“How did he not take anything? My purse and your wallet are in plain view. He must have just gotten here when I woke up.”

“What if he had been armed?”

“Think he had a knife?”

The possibilities and probabilities swirled around in our minds until we were exhausted. We were so lucky to be safe and have nothing taken, but our vulnerability had been revealed. It’s hard to describe how terrifying it is to realize that a person tried to take advantage of you in such a vulnerable state – a vulnerable state that you enter into every day.

We now take extra precautions to stay safe – for example, double checking the windows and leaning an umbrella against a door so that it falls loudly upon opening. In the end, we are pretty lucky to have some new knowledge of how to protect ourselves while also having somehow maintained all our belongings.

The hotel was wildly apologetic. They told us this was the first time that had happened, and though at first we were unsure if this was true, it became easier to believe them as we witnessed as employees would come on shift and soon after, head outside full of curiosity. We watched several of them stand outside our window trying to trace a path to our balcony from nearby buildings. They were clearly surprised.

Our balcony marked by an x.

The arrow is pointing at the sign he climbed to the top of the cafe. He then climbed from that roof over to the balcony next door to ours.

Kirk and I ended up “napping” after our 4 am adventure, getting a (now much needed) later start to our day than we originally intended. When we finally started the day, it turned out to be wonderful. The hotel let us rent a motorbike for free (due to our misfortune) and we were able to go visit some famous waterfalls nearby. Unlike our morning, both the waterfalls and the journey to them were beautiful and (mostly) peaceful – a much needed getaway.

Here are a few pictures from our journey:

I mentioned in the last blog that many people wear the straw hats while working in the fields – here’s a picture of a group we passed working hard in their hats.

At one point we came up on slow moving traffic. As it turned out, a motorbike with crates full of live fish had fallen over into the road. I’m not sure this was an appropriate thing to laugh at, but we couldn’t help but chuckle as a group of people chased these slippery flopping fish around. The laugh was a good relief to the tension we still felt from our stressful morning.

We soon came to another road block – this time, water buffalo. It’s a little intimidating to drive into a herd of these guys with horns, but we made it safely!

We were so close to them!

Eventually we made it to the first falls – Pongour Falls. There are two pretty iconic statues at the entrance to these falls.

The first statue has something to do with the name of the falls. There’s an old folk story that I don’t quite understand of a girl who lead an army into battle as she rode a rhino. They saved the village and somehow out of that the falls were formed.

The second statue, Happy Buddha. Dalat is actually home to a humongous 50 foot tall Happy Buddha, but this smaller version is the only one we made it to see. Even this one was pretty big, but nothing compared to a 50 foot one!

A panoramic of the falls 🙂

Us 🙂

A man fishing near the falls :). The water was pretty clear! Also, in rainy season there is significantly more water coming down these falls.

Side view

My attempt to show how large the falls are. They ended up being much taller than I had imagined based on the pictures.

Leaving the falls we drove alongside the river thats flows to form them:

This area is full of lush greens!

We also passed plenty of more green crops, including one I’d never seen before: vanilla beans

We are pretty sure the vines growing up the trees are vanilla bean vines. We saw several pods hanging 🙂

Before heading to the next waterfall we paused at a restaurant on the river for lunch. I order Pho and was greeted with a new herb. We still don’t know what it is, but we really like it! Anyone know?

After lunch we headed on to Elephant Falls. The view from the top wasn’t so great, so we started down the many many stairs towards the bottom.

I’d call this the easy section. After a while the stairs disappeared and you were just climbing on those giant rocks.

Nearing the bottom! This waterfall was much larger than the last, but didn’t have the same beauty. The brown waters don’t draw you in the same way clear water does.

At the bottom

The lines in the rocks reminded me of wood. From the top it looked like enormous logs were at the bottom. The girl fixing her hair just happened to end up in the picture 🤷‍♀️.

After seeing the waterfalls we headed back into town to visit the Dalat Flower Garden. Dalat is known as the “City of Flowers” and their flower garden is quite beautiful

———

—

So many colors!

Dalat itself has some character of it’s own. Below are a few pictures from around the city.

Traffic around one of the main roundabouts.

City Park

Concrete creek that runs through the middle of town

Popular fountain with “vehicle bushes” that are very popular with tourists. At any point in the day you see tons of people on these, which is funny, because it’s located in the middle of a busy roundabout, so it’s a bit dangerous to get to!

Kirk humored me while I tried the car out 🙂

Xuân Huong lake is in the center of Dalat. Here you can rent paddle boats or enjoy dinner by the water side.

And finally, some food we had in Dalat.

We took this picture at a restaurant that basically served one dish – wonton soup. While we had this dish in other places, at this particular restaurant they had a special sauce that you could add in. We unfortunately still have no idea what all was in the sauce, but ginger and hot chili’s were definitely two ingredients. Adding the sauce took the broth from salty savory to complex delicious :). Also, this is basically the whole kitchen. It’s amazing what little space they need to set up a kitchen and restaurant. Many people carry their “restaurants” and set up on the side walk.

“Banh Can” – rice cakes made in small earthen pots without oil. They are served with a meatball broth with green onions. These rice cakes in particular had egg yolk in the middle of the rice cake, and it wasn’t our favorite, though the broth and meatballs were nice.

Finally, I thought you guys might be interested to see our breakfast while in Dalat. This hotel in particular served a buffet, and we made the most of it :). We made the meatball soup into sandwiches (using the broth as a dipping sauce) and ate them alongside noodle soup, stir fried noodles, and watermelon :). Very different than home, but we’ve gotten used to some new breakfast foods since we left!

The final blog for Vietnam is next, Ho Chi Minh City :).