Tuesday, March 2, 2010

DaLat














It’s now morning in Dalat, a resort city perched at 6000 ft above sea level. There’s an occasional cloud drifting across the city and it drizzles for a few hours every afternoon. The temperature is about 70 degrees year round.

Dalat is decidedly a French city. When the French colonial administrators 150 years ago realized that they could not go home to France very easily, they built this place as a substitute. There are very French cafes and restaurants and the hotel we’re staying in is the old resort hotel on top of the major hill in town across from the very French Catholic church. Attached to the church is the Catholic school where students wear blue uniforms and go to school when the bells chime at 0600. But it’s full daylight here by then because we’re high and this is the tropics.

During both Vietnam wars, Dalat was a city that was off-limits to combat by both sides. It has no strategic value except as a communications center for antennas since it’s so high. And both sides used it for a R&R center so it escaped the war largely intact. The indigenous people here are the mountain people of Vietnam, commonly called montagnards. But that is a pejorative term – while the French translation is literally “mountain people”, the commonly understood term is “savages”. Which is normally taken as an insult of course, so one must be careful. The “yards” are very small and dark and like all mountain people, quite sturdy. They don’t live in the famous long houses any more, but in government sponsored project houses, built mostly along the roads. Apparently the Hanoi government has concerns about the political stability of this region – as they should because the mountain people in this region have revolted several times. They were trained by US Special Forces to defend themselves and have not forgotten how. The last revolt about 5 years ago was apparently supported by a contingent of Americans from the Fayetteville/Ft Bragg area – fancy that!! Nearly everywhere we’ve been in montagnard country has required special government permission to ensure that we are not subversives bent on reviving the montagnard revolt.

We’re taking a day off from riding today and will head back to Saigon tonite via air in preparation for returning to the world. Because we’ve ridden bikes about 40-50 miles/day for the last 5 days, my body is demanding a break. So xin chao for now, catch up with you in Saigon.

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