The Crazy House, the Emperor's Bathtub, and Weasels that Poop Coffee

Here's an astounding true fact about Dalat: the city boasts over 12,400 coffee shops, yet not a single bar.

Just kidding. There are only 12,300 coffee shops.

~

Not a strobe light or Filipino cover band to be seen.

Many things in life are much better in theory than practice, such as Ikea sectional couches, communism*, and Chris Gaines. To that list we can add 'driving 12 hours to a resort city on a national holiday without booking accommodations first'.

*Just kidding - it's totally great!

As seasoned backpackers, my traveling compatriot Jerome and I were scornful of those timid souls who suggested we find something on Hostelbookers or Agoda before leaving Saigon. We were young, intrepid, resourceful men of the road; only old women and the Japanese book ahead.

Apparently living through the Great Depression and Godzilla attacks has taught those people something. Because when we arrived in Dalat, tired and dusty and sore-assed from the road, we found that all the hotels were indeed booked. This is no small accomplishment for the tourism industry of Dalat, since hotels are rivaled in abundance only by coffee shops and brothels (you're not fooling anybody, 'Massage and Spa'). On one particular street we counted 13 hotels within a two minute walk. Unfortunately they had zero available rooms between them.

Up the road we found one hotel that looked promising - a sign reading 'Room for Rent' hung in the entrance way. Sadly, although the hotel had plenty of vacancies it was woefully short of staff. We spent a solid five minutes hollering 'Anh oi!' and staring dumbly at the desk before shuffling out dejectedly.

Eventually we did find a hotel; one of those peculiar to Southeast Asia where the ground floor doubles as a family home, and the family in question seems entirely unfazed by a couple of dirty, wild-eyed foreigners tramping in, waving their passports crazily in the air and hollering 'two beds, two beds!' right in the middle of dinner. The woman who owned the place was more than happy to oblige, for the outrageously extortionate price of 1 million VND. To put that in perspective, last year the Labor Ministry announced that the average monthly salary of a Vietnamese worker was 3.84 million VND.

Perhaps you could justify blowing a quarter of your monthly wages on a single night in a hotel if, say, you were staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan with the Swedish gymnastics team and a suitcase full of cocaine. At a B- facsimile of a Holiday Inn, it seemed excessive.  However, as the woman gleefully informed us, it was 'the only room in town'. Too tired to argue with her or continue the search, we trudged upstairs to our room, desperate for a shower and a soft pillow. When we left in the morning, I vengefully flushed half a roll of tissue down the toilet, ignoring our host's previous instructions to 'put dirty paper in basket'. I assume that it caused a horrific plumbing catastrophe and taught her a valuable lesson about price gouging.

~

The next day, as we groggily hit the streets in search of breakfast and adventure, we noticed something curious: neither of us were sweating. Although it was nearly noon, temperatures were only in the high 70s - still warm enough for shorts and a T-shirt, yet conceivably just cool enough for jeans and long sleeves. I sauntered down the sidewalk feeling sassy and carefree, no armpit stains or butt sweat, with my hair mercifully released from its bun-prison to cascade gloriously down my back. Dalat really did have the most amazing weather in Vietnam. Which is why it was curious to see all the Vietnamese dressed like this:

Seriously.

First, let me explain - Vietnamese fashion is utterly baffling.. In Saigon, where the current temperature is 45 C / 112 F, most young women drive around in long pants, jackets, hoods, elbow-high gloves, giant sunglasses and full face masks. They do this to avoid any possible contact with the sun, because they think pale skin is beautiful (like most of Asia).

It seems at no point have they considered that: A) this makes them look like stormtroopers, B) stormtroopers are unattractive, C) trying to appear more attractive by dressing unattractively is a terrible strategy. Every time I look at them I feel a barely controllable urge to push them off their motorbikes, which is a perfectly legitimate reaction because science.

'I bet there's a really pretty girl under there,' said nobody ever.

Other sartorial observations: old Vietnamese men are often shirtless, and toddlers seldom wear pants. After reaching the age of 40, ladies are required by law to wear floral pajamas whenever they appear in public. Ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese dress, looks fantastic on 18-30 year olds and creepily unsettling on everybody else.

But I digress. The important thing is that, in the midst of this autumnal paradise, entire Vietnamese families were walking around dressed like members of Shackleton's expedition. In a country where geckos are the most common house 'pests' and wayward coconuts pose an ever-present danger to pedestrians, people were bundled up in parkas, ski hats, and mittens. I even saw a store selling those puffy black North Face jackets.

#2 on the 'List of Things You Don't Need in Vietnam', right after heated car seats.

And so we strode along the surprisingly clean and empty streets of Dalat, making bemused faces at the occasional neurotic mother practically smothering her child with unnecessary scarves and fleece shawls,  as if little Tram risked pneumonia in the dangerously non-stifling elements. After a quick stop at the Post Office, where a helpful employee with limited English skills but a terrific map helped us get oriented, we meandered our way to Huỳnh Thúc Kháng street. Our destination was the Hang Nga Guesthouse, more commonly known as 'Crazy House'.

Pretty crazy. Pretty house-y.

Crazy House is, by far, my favorite building in Vietnam. It is not so much a house as a compound, and not so much a compound as a series of interconnected buildings that are vaguely house-shaped and clearly inspired by massive amounts of hallucinogens. There is no satisfactory way to describe Crazy House without using pictures, so here are some now:

M.C. Escher would be thrilled. 

Climbing a giraffe's neck.

Part of...something.

Crazy House was designed by Dang Viet Nga, a female architect with a Ph D. from the University of Moscow. Her father was Truong Chinh, the second president of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and longtime confidant of Ho Chi Minh. There is a room in the Crazy House plastered with pictures of Nga and her father, along with articles and testimonials extolling the virtues of her bizarre creation in half a dozen languages.

Lovely.

Ranked by the Chinese magazine People's Daily as one of the ten weirdest things ever built.

However, this may be the least interesting section of the house. Because the actual guest rooms are filled with red-eyed animatronic kangaroos, curiously menacing bears, and some interior decorating straight out of Middle Earth.

Haunted kangaroo.

Not sure if the bulbous eyes or enormous bees are more unsettling.

Bilbo Baggins would feel right at home.

Best of all, the guesthouse is dotted with obscure little nooks that practically beg to be occupied by nerds with thick glasses, steaming mugs of tea, and the complete works of Emily Dickinson on a rainy afternoon. Jerome and I stumbled upon many of these hideaways and each time felt stirring flashbacks to our younger, more innocent days. And then we'd scramble to avoid morbidly obese Russian tourists intent on snapping as many pictures as possible without ever actually looking at anything. It was fun.

A Jerome-sized cranny.

Eventually it came time to leave the Crazy House, as there are only so many arched skyways and giant nesting dolls one can gawk at before it all starts to look same-same. As we walked out the surprisingly normal entrance way, I gave silent thanks that Ms. Nga was blessed with such a vivid artistic imagination and superhuman tolerance for massive amounts of LSD. Because there was really no other explanation* for what we'd just seen.

Tam biet, Crazy House!

*At least not one nearly as enjoyable to ponder.

Emperor Bao Dai's palace.

Our next stop on this walking tour of Dalat was the palace of Emperor Bao Dai, the last ruler of the Nguyen Dynasty. Although Lonely Planet fails to mention it, Bao Dai's palace may be the kitschiest and least-impressive imperial palace in Asia. I first suspected this when we strolled onto the grounds and were immediately accosted by several grotesque clowns sporting traditional Vietnamese garb. And then we saw the flower-petal Vespas, which confirmed all our previous suspicions:

Sir Elton, your scooter awaits.

The grounds of the palace were fairly nice, though marred by several photo-op areas where crowds of people lined up to take pictures under heart shaped arches and cardboard cutouts of the old royal guard.  Some of the rooms inside were impressive though dilapidated in a fashion unique to 1950s buildings, where the current shabbiness not only obscures its past grandeur but renders it nearly unimaginable.

The Emperor's bedroom, apparently.

The palace was nice but underwhelming, and we soon beat a hasty retreat to the exit to avoid the swarms of camera-wielding Vietnamese who merrily avoided security ropes and ignored plaintive signs begging visitors to not touch/sit on/steal things in their mad dash for one more picture. Which is not to say we were entirely immune to the appeal of taking a few shots with the Emperor's furniture....

Chillin' like the proverbial villains.

At this point it was around 5:00pm, that curious time of day in Southeast Asia when the sky grows darker, the air gets cooler, and yet it still seems entirely too early for dinner. We wandered back into the heart of the city, near Dalat Market, occasionally pointing out attractive girls and asking the same questions ad nauseum.

'What do you want to do?'
'Doesn't matter to me. I'm good with anything. You?'
'Yeah, I'm cool either way.'

Usually in Southeast Asia there is a relatively simple solution to this problem: find the nearest bar (there should be one within ten meters or so), order two of their largest and cheapest beers, and start drinking heavily until you either pass out or feel hungry (which happen simultaneously more often than you'd think). However, as mentioned before, there are no bars in Dalat. Which isn't to say that there are actually no bars, only that they are so scarce and inconveniently located as to be practically inaccessible to anyone without expensive GPS equipment or an bloodhound-like nose for alcohol.

Which brings up an interesting point - chiefly, that although Dalat is certainly a 'vacation' city, it is not a drinking city. Coming from Korea, where all holidaymakers are legally obligated to be shit-faced off soju by sundown (or America, where 'camping' should really be referred to as 'getting drunk while building a fire and then getting even more drunk while trying not to fall into that fire'), it was astonishing to see such a largely booze-free vacation environment. At all hours of the day, Dalat's ubiquitous coffee shops were crammed with people sipping iced coffees and chatting incessantly, even without the benefit of liquid courage/humor/wisdom. It was endearing and depressing at the same time.

Apparently Dalat is quite famous for its coffee. Or so we were told by a group of friends we met the night before at the night market, though personally I suspect they had Dalat confused with Dak Lak, where the legendary ''weasel coffee' is grown. For those unfamiliar with the unique process of creating 'weasel coffee':

1) Coffee beans are fed to civets (small cat-like animals quite dissimilar to actual weasels).
2) Civets excrete the beans, which became magically delicious somewhere in their small intestines.
3) You happily pay twice the price for a cup of coffee brewed from the shit-beans, and annoy your friends with your hip insistence that, 'seriously, it's SO good'.

We never actually found weasel coffee in Dalat, though we did drink several cups of the local brew (known as cafe Da Lat). It was in fact pretty drinkable, if not quite remarkable enough to make sitting at a coffee shop for eight straight hours seem fun. But the Vietnamese tourists seemed happy enough to while away their days stirring those milky, sugary, booze-less concoctions.

Dalat's idiosyncrasies made perfect sense when we belatedly came to the realization that it is one of the few tourist destinations in Vietnam that is aimed at domestic rather than foreign tourists. Saigon is a sprawling metropolis with more than ten million people, many of whom have the disposable income and leisure time to spend a few days chilling up in the mountains away from the noise and grime of the big city. They want to ride tandem bicycles and pedal swan boats and wear couples' stocking caps when it's 25 C outside. These things seem tacky and bizarre to foreign visitors, perhaps rightfully so, but there are plenty of Vietnamese people happy enough to open their wallets, and in any case foreigners are rarely consulted on matters of Vietnamese tourism policy.

I think it's a worthwhile trade, though - booze for bliss. They know what they like, and they see no reason to complicate matters with a lot of loud nightclubs and drunken shenanigans in the street. The Vietnamese people I saw in Dalat seemed happier than their fellow citizens everywhere else; even the xe om drivers were less lecherously aggressive. People smiled and laughed as they walked down the street, groups of young women could stroll around the lake unmolested at night, and hardly anybody whispered offers of 'massa-boom-boom' or 'mari-wanna' at the street corners. The general chaos and filth of Saigon seemed lightyears away, and I understood why the Vietnamese talk about Dalat with such adoring tones.

It might be a dull spot for Spring Break, but it was a lovely place to spend Liberation Day.

Author's note: In case you were wondering, we did succeed in finding a bar that night. I believe it was called 'The Hangout', and we were lured there under the false pretense of being able to select our own music. To find the bar, simply walk in circles around the market for about half an hour, poke helplessly at the blank Google Maps page on your iPod, then call a directionally-talented friend to rescue you. The bar serves a half-decent gin and tonic.