A procession of people coming to pay their respects to King Hung Vuong

Saturday morning I woke up just before dawn.  The bed in my hotel room was right next to the window, so why I’ll was still laying there I leaned over and pulled the curtains aside to take a peek outside.  Thank God, I wasn’t disappointed in what I saw.  Clear blue skies, with strands of thin, wispy clouds, illuminated bright pink in the early morning light.  My friend was already getting dressed to go outside and shoot some stuff down at Xuan Huong Lake.  I decided to get another hour of sleep or so myself, figuring I’d be better off making sure I was well-rested before going to the festival.  After falling back asleep and then waking up I phoned my friend to find out where he was, and headed down to meet him for a coffee in the morning.

Dalat is a coffee town, and I’m a coffee guy.  Dalat was considered a hill station getaway during the French colonial days, and they left behind two pleasant legacies:  beautiful architecture and coffee plantations.  If you’re not hip to Vietnamese coffee yet, you  should be.  I’ve done a lot of traveling and I’ve drank a lot of coffee, but I’ve yet to find anywhere that has as tasty a cup of joe as Vietnam.  The cool, humid hills are also perfect for growing tea, and nice, fresh, hot tea is served pretty much everywhere you go.  In fact, if you order a cup of coffee, they bring you a pot of tea for free, also.  Whenever I go to Dalat I find myself starting and ending each day with coffee, tea or both, usually in some beautiful, leafy spot overlooking the town.  It’s one of the difficult parts of the job.

Tea - one of Dalat's finest products

So after a cup or 3, we hopped on our motorbike (a rental bike – the cops still have the one I rode up on) and drove about 10km out of town to Prenn waterfall, the site where the festival was taking place.  When we arrived the majority of the people were still arriving, and so we did the only sensible thing – we sat down to drink more coffee while waiting for the festivities to begin.  Buzzing from the caffeine and the collective excitement of all the festival-goers, we hiked up a large hill adjacent to the waterfall to reach the first of three pagodas which host the event.

I was not disappointed with my decision to come.  As we were reaching the first pagoda grounds we were greeted by several old men in bright yellow, blue and red traditional outfits walking down the path, and when we reached the top of the hill there was a crowd of older women dressed all in pink standing at the pagoda doors, holding large signs and banners.  Groups of people were walking up to pray and offer incense.  Many younger men were dressed in matching shirts, pants and hats made of red and yellow satin, and the young women were wearing thick black bands around their foreheads and beautiful patchwork dresses of many different colors.  The entire procession of people traveled from one pagoda down to a second, and finally to a third, praying and performing rituals at each one.

Old guys I met on the path

The third pagoda was where the party really started.  After the older people and the monks had finished all their ceremonies the games started.  Under a great big tarp they played a game of “human chess”, where two teams stood facing each other, each person wearing a hat with a Chinese symbol on it to signify their rank.  Older men actually sat playing on a chess board, while a guy with a megaphone shouted out their moves to the people standing on the human chess board.  Off in another direction, a huge wooden swing stood, designed for two people to stand on together, shifting their weight back and forth to get moving, trying to go as high as possible.  There were dancing games where couples would have to dance and jump to avoid having their feet smashed by bamboo poles that other people sitting on the ground were rhythmically smacking together and pulling apart, and another odd game where two boys carried a large clay pot with a fire underneath it between them on two poles, while a girl followed them around trying to shove sticks into the fire to keep the flames from dying out.  In the pots was cooking rice, and after 30 minutes or so all of them had to stop so a man could come and taste their rice.  The group with the tastiest, best cooked rice won.

The weird walking/cooking rice game

Before Noon I was ready to go.  Sure, I could have stuck around and worked all afternoon.  But my goal had been to get a set of really nice portraits of men and women, old and young, dressed in brightly colored traditional clothing.  Mission accomplished.  At that point, I couldn’t have cared less if it had rained for the next two days straight, if it was cold, nasty, whatever.  I got what I had came for, and that made it all worthwhile.  Forget it if it was cloudy for the rest of the day.

And it was cloudy for the rest of the day!  We still drove around, checking out the countryside and looking for more shots.  But it was a leisurely, relaxing afternoon, and the clouds actually did break up in the late afternoon just enough to get a few shots.  I’ve been working on getting shots of tree trunks recently.  On my Tay Ninh trip entry I posted a picture of oil palm trunks, and I worked on getting a few more shots on the Saturday afternoon in Dalat.  How do you take a good, interesting, eye-catching picture of tree trunks?  If you’ve never tried it, give it a shot.  It’s not easy.   I had to sit down and drink more coffee at a small, mountain-top café to work at it.  As the sun was about to go down we headed to an overlook above the town wher I got a few more good shots (see the first photo in Part 1 of this story), and then we called it a day.

Trying to get good tree shots...

The night was ridiculous.  I never thought of eating seafood in this mountain town, but there was a little street restaurant near our hotel and we decided to check it out.  Simply stated, I’ve never been so stuff with shellfish in my entire life.  We ate 13 dishes between the 2 of us, and you can see the wreckage from the photo above.  Yes, only two of us did that.  I’m a pig.  Don’t bother telling me, I already know.  It was just so damn good.  I could have eaten more, but I was already embarrassed by the pile of empty plates mounding up at our feet.  When the dinner was over I put them all back on the table for a photo op.  I think we ate more than the 3 tables closest to us combined.

Seafood dinner aftermath

The second morning was spent split between driving my mate around and looking for stuff he can use in travel brochures, and hanging out at the “crazy house”.  A daughter of one of Vietnam’s revolutionary heroes was apparently an architecture major, and she decided she was going to build a huge house that blended nature and architecture.  Well, the woman is a bit nuts, and as a result, so was her “eco-house”, or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.  The place really needs to be seen to be fully appreciated.

"Modern" architecture at the Dalat Crazy House

The hallways are these winding staircase affairs, twisting and turning in and out of multiple buildings, leading to oddly-shaped rooms that usually contain large statues of strangely anthropomorphic animals.  The two meter tall kangaroo with red Christmas lights for eyes was a personal favorite of mine…  A few of the buildings are still unfinished, and a sign outside stated that she hopes to have it completed by the end of 2010.  For $1, it was totally worth the trip.

Crazy stairs at the Crazy House

Apparently they rent out the rooms to tourists, also – $25 for a single, $35 for a double.  However, tours start at 7am, so I would only suggest renting one of the rooms there if you intend to be awake, showered, and out the front door before 7 o’clock.

One of the luxurious suites available at the Crazy House

My friend needed some nice shots of garden restaurants and 5 star hotels, so we stopped off at a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the lake for a couple of coffees, and then headed down to an old 5 star French hotel with huge grounds and enjoyed a glass of wine.  He asked if he could use my wide-angle lens for a while, then he ran off shooting the hotel, and I just sat there enjoying the cool weather, the nice breeze, and my nice glass of red.  From there, off to a big lunch, and that was the weekend.  Clouds rolled in that afternoon, and they didn’t go away.  I spent some time in the market buying fruit for friends back in Saigon, and after another couple of coffees around town we settled down to an interesting dinner of deer, ostrich and porcupine.  Yes, the porcupine was delicious.  Seriously.  I was quite surprised.  It went down great with the beer, and stuffed to the gills I retired early and slept until 5am, when we had to get up to get ready for our bus ride back to Saigon.

And the trip basically ended as bad as it started.  I felt queasy from the moment I woke up, and it didn’t get any better.  Our bus driver was far more cautious and respectful than the guy we had coming in, but it didn’t matter. By the time we arrived in Saigon I figured I must have looked completely green, and I spent the rest of the day in bed sick as a dog.  I had to call in to my night job and miss another shift, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.  My friend was supposed to loan me another body to shoot with at Lao New Year so I wouldn’t have to worry about changing from a wide-angle to a portrait lens during the water-throwing madness that takes place there, and in my sickened state I completely forgot to contact him.

And again, that wasn’t the worst part – my buddy left the next day for Nha Trang, and wouldn’t be returning for a week.  I received a call from him after he had been in Nha Trang all day, and he was standing on the beach with his camera in his hand – and my wide-angle lens.  I never got it back from him after he shot the hotel in Dalat.  After a few days in Dalat I had no motorbike, no wide-angle lens, and was sick hell.  But I got my portraits!  And I have a feeling everything will work out for my trip to Luang Prabang.

The view from above Dalat - when the weather is nice

So, another weekend, another trip.  Saturday was the anniversary of the death of King Hung Vuong in Vietnam, and it’s a public holiday here.  Several years ago I took a short trip to Dalat on the same occasion, but at the time I had no clue it was a special day at all, and basically through dumb luck I stumbled upon a large festival commemorating the event at a set of 3 pagodas located on a hill above Prenn waterfall, about 10 kilometers outside of the town.  I wasn’t shooting seriously at the time, but I have vivid memories of large amounts of people, young and old, participating in the celebrations dressed in multi-colored traditional costumes, and participating in various rituals and public games.  So, when I found out that the holiday was coming up, I immediately decided that I wanted to drive up there and get a great set of colorful portraits to add to the stock I’m building at the moment.  The decision was made all the easier by the fact that April is the hottest month of the year in Saigon. Living in Saigon feels like living in a hot armpit just about now, and Dalat is renowned for being a cool, breezy, hilltop getaway town.  What better place to spend a few days working… and relaxing?

I asked a good friend if he wanted to go up with me for the weekend, and after debating for not very long he decided he could get some material there as well, and would also enjoy the break from the city heat.  So 5am on Friday morning I picked him up and we set off east out of the city.

Dalat - Vietnamese hill town with a French flavor

The first place you hit outside of Saigon is the city of Bien Hoa in Dong Nai province.  I absolutely hate driving through Bien Hoa.  It’s always terrible.  The highway runs straight through the center of the city, and the traffic slows down and becomes a chaotic, dirty, stinky mess.  Big, filthy, rattling trucks jostle for position with smaller delivery vehicles, taxis and three-wheeled carts while thousands of people on motorbikes weave and wind their way through them.  Add to this that there are markets right along the highway with people standing out in the road, and all along the length of the town people run in and out of the traffic and go sprinting across the highway, hopping over the concrete dividers to get to the other side.  God forbid you get into town when the schools are opening or letting out, because then you get to add hundreds of kids in uniforms and “ao dai” on bicycle and on foot running in and out of the street and clustering along the edges of the road.  By the time I get out of Bien Hoa I’m always hot and stressed out, with my eyes stinging from the dust and exhaust and about a centimeter of filth on my face and hands.  This time I figured that leaving so early would eliminate a lot of the craziness on the road, and at first it seemed like we would get through the city with a minimum of agony.  But then, as we reached the end of the town all the students poured out onto to the highway to go to school.  15 minutes earlier and we would have missed it completely.

We stopped for the obligatory breakfast and coffee break after slogging our way through Bien Hoa, and then we finally made our way through Trang Bom, the last town before the turn-off to Dalat.  As we were making the turn north towards Dalat I was joking to my friend… “We have it too easy here, you know?  Two weekends ago when I went to Tay Ninh I got stopped for speeding by two cops with new radar guns.  When they realized I was foreign they figured I couldn’t speak Vietnamese and just let me go.  If I were a local I’d have been paying a fine.  Anyhow, how am I supposed to know what the speed limit is?  There are no signs!”

This is true.  There are no speed limit signs.  Maybe there are specific national laws regarding speed limits through rural and populated areas. How am I supposed to know?  I don’t even have a license in Vietnam…

View from the bridge over Tri An Lake, near Dinh Quan village

About 30km or so north of Trang Bom the highway crosses a thin eastern arm of Ho Tri An, a large lake in the hills, formed by a hydroelectric dam on the west side of Dong Nai province.  The bridge there dissects a small community of floating houses in the lake, and we decided to stop and get some shots from over the water.  Standing there, enjoying the cool morning breeze and feeling the stress start to lift after getting off the main highway I got my first good shot of the weekend.  I turned to my friend and said “It’s going to be a great weekend, man…  we’re having a good day already!”

After setting off again we reached the town of Dinh Quan.  The highway leading into the town heads over a low ridge with rice fields and hamlets in it, stretching off towards gently rolling hills in the distance, and at this time of day the sun was hanging just above them.  The highway hugs some low, leafy cliffs on the left hand side and then turns into the village and past busy morning markets.  Up in the distance is a big, white Buddha statue on top of a small peak, with a scenic rock garden spreading out below it.  A smile forms on my face as I debate stopping there, and then…

Stop.  There’s a tan-uniformed cop in the road angrily waving a baton at me, telling me to pull over.  I give him a confused look – this time not feigning foreign idiocy, but seriously not understanding why I was being pulled over.  The cop walks up to me and says “Please sir, turn off moto-bye.  You go too fast – here can only go 40kph, you going 55kph.”  Not exactly perfect English, but far better than I expected.  As switch the bike off he says “I need see your driver card, your insurance card, your bike number card”

The Big Buddha - taken on a previous trip when I didn't lose my bike.

Insurance?  What?!  Insurance has never been required in Vietnam!  Well, guess what!  April Fool’s!  From the 1st of April all bikes on the street were required to have insurance.  For me, this is made all the worse by the fact that I DID have insurance, but it had just expired and I hadn’t bothered to renew it yet.  And, as I mentioned earlier, I seriously have no idea how I’m supposed to know what the speed limits are.  Before they acquired these new radar guns it was never an issue.

Speeding, no license, no registration, and no insurance.  Do you think I walked away with my motorbike?  Well, I certainly did walk away, but with three sheets of police paperwork instead of my bike.  They confiscated my bike for 7 days and sent me on my way, 120km from home.  I tried begging and pleading with the officer, telling him how far from home I was, explaining I need my bike for work next week, and finally telling him that next weekend I’ll be leaving for Laos and won’t be able to come and get my bike.  He smiled, nodded his head, and said “you drive with no driver card…  you lose moto-bye one week”.

Yep.  The trip is off to a great start.

My buddy and I stopped to get a coffee while I steamed and spat about getting pulled over by one of the few honest cops I’ve ever met in Vietnam.  But how pissed off can I really be?  It was my fault.  And if I’d been in the USA I probably would have had to call somebody to bail me out of jail.  After calming down a bit, we entered the worst segment of our journey – the mini-bus between Dinh Quan and Dalat.

Are you a thrill-seeker?  Do death, danger, and the feeling of imminent demise keep you coming back for more?  Does your idea of a good time involve staring death in the face, only to be miraculously snatched from it’s hands at the very last moment, and then to find yourself dangling within it’s grasp yet again?  Well, then, my friend, mini-bus travel in Vietnam is for you!  I can only describe our new-found driver as a sociopathic maniac with no regard for safety or respect for other people’s well-being, and a complete lack of understanding of cause and effect relationships – common traits on Vietnamese highways.  He seemed to drive in the oncoming lane simply as a matter of principle, veering back into our lane, barely averting disaster, while his ratty haired assistant leaned out the window and screamed mercilessly at the cyclists and pedestrians they narrowly avoiding wiping off the face of the earth again and again.  This “assistant” position is a legitimate job in Vietnam, apparently.  All psychotic bus and mini-bus drivers seem to employ somebody whose dual purpose is to smash as much human flesh as possible into a vehicle, and cuss and scream at people as they drive past.  Their mothers must be so proud.  As we careened up and down Bao Loc pass the driver insisted on screaming past trucks and buses at top speed around blind curves, while he leaned persistently on his horn.  This is why I prefer to take my own motorbike rather than public transportation.  I did my best to sleep all the way to Dalat… or keep my eyes closed at the very least.

The cloudy view that greeted us...

As the satanic death drive was heading into the final stretch before our destination, the clouds started to roll in, darkening the sky and killing the light.  After all the crap I’d gone through up to this point it was looking like I wasn’t even going to get to shoot some photos in the afternoon.  Whatever.  I was so happy to be alive when I finally got off the mini-bus at the station above the town that I didn’t even care, and I was thrilled to death to see the town of Dalat stretching down below as I took a cab down towards Xuan Huong Lake and the center of town.  Anyhow, my goal on this trip wasn’t to get town shots, it was to get portraits at the festival.  I’d have to wait until the next day to see if my bad luck was going to continue…