Jake Catlett Photography

Destination: Dalat (Part 2)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.