Mountains and Motorcycles

Dalat from above.

Dalat holds a special place in the hearts of the Vietnamese, much like Jeju for the Koreans or Paris for Americans who've never actually been there. If you ask a Vietnamese about the city their eyes immediately glaze over. With a sigh and slump of the shoulders, they adopt the posture of a person who just finished a round of exhausting and emotionally satisfying coitus. They will usually gush something about the mountains, clean air, and pinewood forests. Before this, however, is a nearly orgasmic description of the weather.

To understand why Dalat's weather inspires such universal adoration amongst the Vietnamese,  you must consider the climate of Saigon. On an average day, the temperature ranges from 'Jesus, it's fucking hot,' to 'please just kill me now'. Today, for example, the temperature is 39 degrees Celsius, which is equivalent to 102 degrees Fahrenheit (God's preferred unit of heat measurement). Old people literally wilt as they shuffle down the alleyways and ice cream salesmen struggle vainly to fend off packs of ravenous and heat-crazed schoolchildren. I have not yet tried to fry an egg on the hood of my car, mostly because I don't own a car and hate the smell of fried eggs but also because it is dangerous to venture further than five feet from the nearest fan.

It's really, really, REALLY hot here.

~

My native state of Minnesota, USA is colloquially described as having two seasons: winter and road construction (which is also cold, but with more mosquitoes). To me, then, the idea of holidaying in a city BECAUSE it's colder than home seems odd, to be polite, or batshit crazy, to be truthful. However after six months of sweating through fabrics of all colors and thicknesses, experiencing hair frizz that would make Sideshow Bob jealous, and generally feeling that every trip outside was like walking through a bowl of hot soup, I was ready to give Dalat a try.

~

The weather wasn't my only motivation for checking out this mountain getaway, though. Shortly after arriving in Vietnam I bought my first motorcycle, which triggered a long-dormant love affair I have with loud, fast, shiny things I don't know how to fix. I am very fond of my little Honda '67, and have spared no expense to make it the loudest, fastest, and shiniest machine in the phuong. However, all the blood, sweat, tears and dong I've poured into this burgundy moneypit are largely wasted in the city, where traffic speeds rarely crack 30 kph and the most useful parts of a bike are its horn and its brakes. I was dying to take my girl for a proper trip to the country where I could open her up and maybe, just maybe, drive for a few klicks without nearly getting T-boned by a fucking taxi.

~

Luckily, several months ago I met a kindred spirit with similar delusions of a grand Easy Rider-type jaunt to the highlands. His name was Jerome, and he was an interesting cat. His life journey had been more convoluted than a Faulkner novel but from what I could piece together he was a semi-avid musician/DJ/English teacher with Swiss-French roots and a hopelessly idealistic view of the road. I couldn't have asked for a better travel buddy. He also rode a Honda '67, which gave our prospective trip a nice 'theme'. Two long-haired rebels tearing down the country roads, leaving a trail of dust, broken hearts, and motor oil behind us. '67s are notoriously leaky.

The '67s.

~

We set off early Monday morning with the merciless Vietnamese sun already burning through the pitifully inadequate layer of SPF30 on my arms and face. Looking appropriately outlaw-ish with our dark sunglasses, bandanas and small travel packs, we inched our way through the stifling traffic of downtown Saigon and blasted through the mammoth tunnel leading to the outskirts of the city. We rode side-by-side, laughing at the befuddled looks we were getting from our fellow motorists and making grand proclamations about the plentiful delights awaiting us in Dalat. We were out of the city, and on our way.

Except for one small detail - we weren't really out of the city. Saigon, it turns out, is much like the Hotel California in that it is nearly impossible to actually leave. After nearly two hours of driving, we were still passing the same Soviet-style concrete buildings, rundown mechanics' garages, and ubiquitous coffee stands that define Saigon's outer, less affluent areas. Passing by a garish, kitschy waterpark that literally swarmed with Vietnamese families seeking respite from the heat, I began to despair of ever reaching the open road, or at least shifting out of 2nd gear. We had set out with the goal of escaping the crowds and there we were, stuck in the familiar smoggy traffic jams of this vast and sprawling urban hell. We gritted our teeth and made increasingly pessimistic predictions about our eventual time of arrival.

~

When we finally reached the junction of Highway 20, which leads more or less directly to Dalat, we felt immensely relieved and slightly less homicidal. Unfortunately our mental state stood in marked contrast to our physical state - after two and a half hours of driving, our asses were completely numb. Actually, numb might be the wrong word, since it implies loss of feeling. My ass, at least, was still perfectly capable of feeling, and mostly it was feeling extremely uncomfortable. After squirming fruitlessly for an eternity, searching for that elusive 'right spot' on the '67's narrow seat, I yelled to Jerome that we had better stop before I drove head-first into a bus just to end the agony.

We pulled off the road into a makeshift rest area covered by a tin and bamboo roof. Underneath stood rows of little chairs and tables, and hammocks drooped lazily from the poles. We ordered iced coffees and began the tiresome process of demonstrating our lack of Vietnamese language skills to the rest stop's proprietor, who was completely undeterred by our inability to answer his questions and spend the next fifteen minutes jabbering in Vietnamese and pointing in the vague direction of 'Daaa-LAT'. His wife looked on, bored out of her mind as she stirred the sugary, syrupy sludge into something resembling coffee. Their small son eyed us distrustfully as we rubbed our legs and traced sweeping curves on Jerome's map of Vietnam, which had clearly been made by a profligate drunkard with a seething hatred of setting distances to scale. Dalat looked close - a few more hours of hard driving and we'd be nestled safely in the highlands, sipping icy bia Saigon and hollering (in a charmingly sophisticated way, of course) at the local ladies.

Rest stop.

~

A funny thing happened in the course of those 'few hours of hard driving'. We didn't reach Dalat, but we did reach the forest. And the hills. It's difficult to imagine what a strange feeling this was without, again, considering Saigon. Thousands of years ago my hometown of Minneapolis was steamrolled by an Ice Age glacier, but even so it has no match for the utter flatness of Saigon. I'm told the result is a bicyclist's paradise, though I haven't willingly ridden a bicycle since Pogs were cool. Also, there are (obviously) no forests in Saigon, where the few trees still standing look as out of place as black people at a Klan rally.

Maybe now you can understand my delighted surprise as we began our climb through the foothills and encountered, of all things, cool air. I clearly remember the moment it happened - we had just passed a rubber tree plantation, narrowly avoiding a clearly-tweaking bus driver as he barreled down the wrong lane blasting his horn as a warning to get the fuck out of his way, pronto. I was still slack-jawed at the sight of so many trees when the familiar blast-furnace air of southern Vietnam was replaced by a crisp, cool breeze that reminded me of autumn in Wisconsin. I whooped with joy and zoomed up to Jerome, happy to share this transformative experience with a fellow traveller. Then a giant lorry screamed by and we quickly returned to reality.

As we continued the ascent, we passed through an area once marked by volcanoes; supposedly there were several calderas still intact not far from the main road. As we had little faith in our ability to communicate our interest in these to the locals (O dau giant-fucking-ancient-geologic-formations?), we contented ourselves with occasional pitstops at small-town coffee shops to give our weary glutes a rest. At one point, near the area known as Magadui, we paused for lunch at a bizarre restaurant/resort that might have been transplanted from Minnesota's northern forests, if not for the incomprehensible Vietnamese menus and mopey ballads echoing softly from someone's overworked iPhone.

A garden paradise, of sorts.

At this point in the story, it is necessary to make an observation about distances in Vietnam. I grew up in the Upper Midwest, where road trips generally involve interminable stretches of interstate highway most notable for the utter lack of anything notable. These highways are long, straight, and generally in excellent condition. It's entirely possible to calculate one's journey using the kind of arithmetic that bores schoolchildren to death - Nick leaves Minneapolis traveling at 70 miles per hour, it's 280 miles to Place X, he arrives in 4 hours. Easy.

This is not the case in Vietnam, especially when riding motorcycles. Speeds are slower, much slower. An interesting design quirk of the Honda '67 is that its speedometer is designed to quit functioning roughly twelve minutes after it is purchased, but we estimated that our usual cruising speed topped out at 50 kph. This doesn't take into consideration all the inevitable slowdowns for oncoming murderers/truck drivers, errant motorbike riders, or idiot kids on bicycles. And more importantly, it does not take into consideration the roads.

While some stretches of highway were absolutely delightful, we encountered one stretch that made me seriously question our sanity for attempting the journey. It would not be entirely honest to even describe it as a 'road' - it was more like a series of potholes (varying in width and depth) with thin lines of intact pavement weaving randomly about the chasms. In rapid succession, we suffered two flat tires, the frame of Jerome's '67 lost several bolts and nearly its entire undercarriage, and this happened:

Yes - the bike shook so hard that the taillight fell off.

So you can understand our eagerness to reach Dalat as quickly as possible. There was only one catch, also relating to the difference between driving in the US as opposed to Vietnam. Which is this: while nighttime driving on Interstate 94 is a time to crank Kenny Rogers and grab a few Red Bulls at the Pump n' Munch, night driving on Vietnamese highways is a knuckle-whitening, pants-soiling endeavor attempted only by the foolish and/or criminally insane. And it was quickly getting dark.

With less than 100 km between us and our final destination, we decided to press on and complete the journey in a single day. At this point it was roughly 5:30pm, and we'd been driving for nine hours. Our spirits were high, however, and the prospect of settling in for the night in some podunk town along the side of the road conjured very unpleasant, Deliverance-y type thoughts. So we kept driving, nervously checking the position of the sun and quipping hopefully about a hot shower and a cold beer.

When the sun finally disappeared behind the mountains, it got dark. I mean, REALLY dark. As in, can't-see-ten-feet-in-front-of-you dark. There are no streetlights on small Vietnamese highways. It was around this time that I learned how fantastically useless the headlight of my motorbike is; it seemed to oscillate between two settings of equal puniness, although the highbeam setting created a slightly wider dullish yellow glow. We were literally driving blind, except when a larger motor vehicle came screaming up behind us to temporarily illuminate the potholes and tree branches in our path.

Also, I was cold. This might have been the strangest feeling I had all trip. But a combination of the cool mountain air and constant wind had achieved the impossible; namely, stopping my profuse sweating and replacing it with the kind of numb-fingered, teeth-chattering discomfort I hadn't experienced since Korea. Out of the frying pan and into the freezer.

Finally, our feeble headlights passed over the most beautiful sight we had seen all day - a small blue sign reading 'Dalat - 7km'. Cackling with the kind of pleasure felt only by those who might not have full control of their mental capacities, we pinned the throttles and jetted down the surprisingly smooth and empty highway. Things were looking up - only a few more minutes and we'd be safely ensconced in a hotel room with soft beds and stealable shampoo.

Almost on cue, I ran out of gas.

After 11 hours of driving I suppose it was inevitable, but it felt like an awfully anticlimactic way to end the journey. Jerome put one foot on the back peg of my '67, and we began the slow and sputtering process of trying to find someone willing to sell us a liter or two of shitty petrol. Eventually, after several false positives and some unwieldy left-hand turns, we found an old lady who happily exchanged one bottle of vile green semi-fuel for 30,000 dong (roughly twice what you'd pay at a proper gas station).

Turning off the beautiful smooth highway (which we nicknamed the 'Uncle Ho Memorial Good Time Number One Super-Happy Driving Road), we began the ascent to Dalat. I'm not sure of Dalat's exact elevation, but it seemed to be impossibly high; I felt as if I was driving to Shangri-La. The switchback roads were steep and narrow; occasionally a car would wiz past and our poor little motorcycles would grumble ill-humoredly, as if they couldn't believe that we would do THIS to them after all the shit they'd been through earlier. Jerome's bike, which had the smaller 70cc engine, was moving at the brisk pace of a elderly powerwalker.

Finally we reached the top of the mountain and gazed down at Dalat. It is a small city, but its buildings cast a kindly, charming light over the plateau. The hotels and restaurants were clustered around the lake, where couples pedaled swan-shaped boats through the calm and gentle waters. We tried exchanging high-fives, thought better of it, and began to meander down to the city proper, eager to find a room and something to eat. The city looked beautifully serene. We'd finally made it.

Immediately upon entering the city we encountered a large roundabout and spent the next fifteen minutes stuck in a hopeless traffic jam, elbow-to-elbow with dozens of assholes who didn't understand the meaning of 'yield' in any language.

It was still Vietnam, after all.

To be continued...