Mountain Town

If I lived in Vietnam, it’d be in Dalat. A city of hills and winding streets, it looks as though it belongs somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, rather than the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The air is mountain-fresh and seasoned by the surrounding pine forests. Their fallen needles scatter across the ground, and when the wind blows across the sharp blue lake and the atmosphere all around you is crisp and open and you can breathe it deep into your lungs, through your stomach, it is pure. It smells like fall and feels like home.

 

The people have pride in their unique city and countryside. Instead of the ubiquitous rice paddies found in the rest of Vietnam, farms here grow grapes, strawberries, and above all, flowers. “Dalat: City of 1000 Flowers,” it is sometimes called. Groves of 8-foot tall sunflowers sprout on the side of every road. 

 

In the morning I step out onto my balcony into a city’s symphony: the low rumbling percussion of motorbike mufflers, the sequestered cacophony of the brass car horns in every stage of disrepair. A mélange of voices asks about price, weight, return familiarities. Once in a while, an overdriven loudspeaker hooked up to a car battery turns a solitary motorbike man into a star soloist.

And I get to look out at this beautiful city of pastel blocks.

 

This is supposed to be a city for romance. Which makes it a prime destination for Vietnamese traveling couples. They stroll together, hand in hand, through the night market. They sit on benches, limbs twisted into knots, for hours, breathing as one, looking into the night sky – stars they can see without the smog of the city. Girls giggle; boys give them flowers. And white people are few and far between.

Things you can do in Dalat.

(Formerly Titled: The Real Reasons I Would Move to Dalat)

Canyoning

Hiking

Bike Rides through country that looks like this

Rock Climbing

Waterfalls

 

This is an outdoorsman’s paradise in Vietnam. Local guides called “Easy Riders” will take you to the hot spots for a small price. But finding them yourself is exponentially more rewarding.

Lang Biang is a five-peak volcanic ridge that rises over Dalat like a parent. And, indeed, the city holds the mountain in exceptionally high praise. It’s a four-hour hike to the highest peak from the ethnic-minority village of Lat, where the locals till the hillside in parabolas around the enormous mountain.

Semi-wild horses patrol the slopes. Ponies, actually, sure-footed through the slippery needle-strewn pine forest. Here the trees reach proper heights. Towards the base they are smaller, Asian approximations of the giants we have in America – weird, squat things with arms growing out at all the wrong angles.

But up higher, near the peak, behemoths regularly rise over 100 feet. Where they have succumbed to gravity, a lance of destruction down the mountain can be seen. Red matchsticks mark the places once guarded by this land’s sentinels. These clearings however, give room for some of the most beautiful panoramas of the Vietnamese highlands.

 

When you find a place like this, it’s easy to want to live in the shadow of the mountain.