Before I begin proper, let me just say that I’m writing off the top of my head, based on what I remember, 2 weeks after coming home. I do this so that only the really memorable things get written. The problem with this of course is, I forget a lot of things, because memory is unreliable. Which is ok to me because I don’t remember what I forgot anyway, and also I lived in the moment, which is enough. But if you were on the same trip with me and remember different things, it’s ok. Different people remember things differently. So let’s get into it with the understanding that there’s not going to be an accurate play by play commentary of what we did.

One of the things Da Lat has over the other destinations of this trip was the temperature, averaging from a cool 16 degrees to a still cool 25 degrees. We arrived in the evening of Malcolm’s wedding, after a 4 hour car ride from Da Teh. It gets dark early, so by the time we got there, which I believe is 6-7pm, the night was upon us. We were tired. It was raining (one of the disadvantages of the cool weather is that when it rains, it sucks). But we checked into Pi Hostel, which was a dream, because we each had our own rooms. And also the rooms were great. And we had hot showers. Creature comforts which we scrimped on 9 years ago, that is easily solved with money.

This Dalat trip was very from 9 years ago, mainly because we went to totally different places, choosing to make this food and chill centric, and hanging out mostly in the city, compared to when we went firing arrows and taking luges and stuff (which was very fun in it’s own right). Out of the blocks, Matt had his first street food, the DaLat pizza, which is a rice paper pizza with toppings and stuff (see? Unreliable memory and unwillingness to google commitment to writing by memory only). We went walking about the day and night market, which seemed more or less the same, and with the cool weather, reminded me of Taiwan night markets. It was a long day, so after dinner, where we checked 3 items (ban can, hot soy milk [IKR] and chicken kuay teow with innards and unmatured eggs) off the list of Dalat specialty food, we went back to rest.

Speaking of specialty food, I had a conversation with the hostel manager about it, and she told me it was mostly tourists who ate it, even though yes, it’s the Da Lat specialties. The locals basically don’t always eat that. I suppose it’s the Singaporean equivalent of eating chilli crab everyday. But we plowed ahead with eating everything on the list, because we are unabashedly tourists. Over our 3-4 days there, we had Mi Quang (beef special), chicken basil hotpot, grilled pork wrap, Phu Gia My (which I will touch on further in a bit) and also a meal of Mexican food.

PS: because come on, there is no such thing as the local experience. We are treated and behave differently, purely from the standpoint that we are not from there, and any “local” experiences are also curated by locals. It is possible to gain insight on how they live, but there is no pure local experience, in my honest opinion at least.

That being said, we were recipients of hospitality on more than one occasion. The first was as we wandered the rainy streets in search of a place to watch Liverpool vs Southampton after the fucking sports bar closed at 10pm. We saw a TV with the game going on at a local hotel, and some uncles drinking beer, smoking and watching the game. So we looked in, asked if we could join in, and they said ok. So we bought beer, settled down, and watched Darwin Nunez rip Southampton a new asshole. It was more than probable that we interrupted a private gathering, but after some goals and some cheers (I think they also supported Liverpool), hopefully we left with more human connections that night.
Another time was at the nem nuong place, where another customer who could speak mandarin helped us with our order, and the aunty who owned the shop taught us how to eat it the right way. I didn’t follow it because it involved a lot of raw vegetables.

Ok, Phu Gia My, the ramen like beef noodles. We went on one of the days at 3pm, only to be informed that the remaining bowls of beef noodles for that day were all reserved. So we made an appointment and went back the next day. The shop was reminiscent of a Japanese ramen/omakase bar, where the chef was right in the middle of an island where he could interact with all customers. The decoration had a decidedly East Asian flavour, and was filled with old audiophile equipment and paintings and ancient artefacts. The boss told us he was only open 4 days a week, selling 80 bowls of noodles a day. And open for only about half the year. Talk about a dream retirement job. Apparently, it WAS his retirement job, as according to him, he had a job that enforced retirement in his 30s, and let him travel around the world. He also doesn’t believe in smart phones, and was using an old Nokia brick that was about 10 years old. He has to be a spy. But I digress. He talked to us about how it all started, when he and his wife, both cooking enthusiasts, and came up with a recipe for Vietnamese beef noodles, and invited friends over to their place to eat. After (I’m sure he said something reasonable but I was distracted eating the food. So, so good), they decided to open it up to public without overworking themselves, hence this. He was also not keen on current DaLat being very touristy, as it added a hustle and bustle to an originally quiet mountain town. Which leads to a question I often ask myself, and will ask again in Hoi An. What is the price of progress, and what is progress even? We left noodle man with our stomachs filled and brains full of questions.

That afternoon - evening, we hit what used to be Da Lat nights to catch a view of the city from light to night, and drink tea. It was spectacular.

Next day was pretty much spent wandering about the city, looking at stuff, walking into cafes etc. Not much to be said about it, but I did like Bicycle Up Cafe, next to Chung King Express (which was a hotpot place we didn’t enter). It was furnished mostly with antiques and was an eclectic, yet comfortable mix of knick knacks that oddly seemed in their place.

The same cannot be said for Crazy House. Crazy house was one of the places we did both 9 years ago and now. And it seems like we never even visited, because of the utter insanity that seemed to be going on in there. The architect was the daughter of one of Ho Chi Minh’s lieutenants, and while the building is structurally sound, it seemed like a chimaera of an alien landscape. This might be because the focus was on organic building, and based on paintings rather than blueprints. Whoever did the paintings might have been more than a little high at the time, leading to this LSD fever dream brought to life, which we now call Crazy House. It definitely lives up to it’s name. While there is method in the madness, it is still madness. That said, chaos is just order which we don’t understand. We can also reflect on ourselves while passing judgement on others.

The lake. The lake is the lake. We walked around the lake and saw some things. Jimmy bought a pair of new shoes in the Esplanade looking building, which was a shopping centre.

Nightlife. Everything seemed to close quite early. We ended up drinking shots of whiskey in the hostel lobby.

All in all, we were in Dalat for 3 days and 3 nights, but it definitely felt like much longer, because we managed to do a lot while getting sufficiently rested.