Bloody Dalat

I went to Dalat. Chris went to Hue. Dalat was the hill resort for the French. This town sees 80,000 Western tourists and 800,000 Asian tourists a year. It's quite popular. On the way over a Vietnamese American dude bought me lunch, gave me his number, offered to be my tour guide in Saigon and explained that the woman and child he was travelling with were not his but just friends.

I met Drew, a 21 year old American kid from Montana, on the bus. We shared a room for two nights and rented a motorbike one of the days. The first night in town we hung out with Dave, who was a little pecular. He was in awe of the night market and the streets and the town and the food and the hotel. He mumbled and chuckled and ran back and forth like a little kid. Dave left us the following day.

Drew and I rented a bike and headed out to the crazy house. An architecual marvel, created by a local woman who had studied in Moscow for a few years. The government burnt down one of her other creations because it was 'counter revolutionary'. Luckily, she's the daughter of the second president of Vietnam, so for now this building stands. It's also a guesthouse. $15 a night for a room....uhm, no thanks.

Next we headed up to the SOS Village orphanage. A rather nice place with about sixteen houses on a lot next to a huge school. The orphanage was created after the war by a French organization. Most of the orphans back then were the kids of US military personnel that had been shipped back home and local Vietnamese women. The women gave the kids up because it was hard for them to raise them in a post war society (especially since the children were half American).

We met a woman there who had sponsored one of the kids. She explained that the boy she had sponsored was the same age as her daughter. She had lost a son before her daughter's birth. Her husband was half Vietnamese. His father had married a French woman in the sixities and moved to France. They still had family in the Nam that they were supporting.

Each house has a mother who looks after 8 to 10 orphans. The one at this particular house has raised 17 children and showed us the wedding invitations she had just sent out for one of the boys she had raised. He was 22 years old and now lived in town near his university. She was so proud. Something tells me that she too had been an orphan here. We were served tea by the eldest (13 years old) girl in the house.

Then came the less fun part of the day. We headed out of town down highway 20 to look for a two storey concrete chicken. We got lost and saw a lake and kept asking for directions. Drew turned the motorbike around on the highway and we stopped every kilometer to ask where the chicken was. We had already driven down the road at least four to five times but each time seemed to have gone too far. This time though we came upon a horrible motorbike accident. A man was sprawled out in the centre of the highway, his motorbike a few feet away. Traffic wasn't slowing down at all. His passenger (I think his mother) was ten feet away at the side of the road on all fours holding her head between her hands. Her face was down near a rock. I saw three men flip the guy on the road over and drag him toward us. His body was like jello. He was unconscious.

The women from a nearby house were hunched over the mother yelling at her. I walked over to her and crouched down. She started to lift her head and the blood started to gush out of her eye. I asked for tissue from the no-good-screaming women and they handed me three squares of toilet paper. The blood was seeping onto my left hand, I asked for more and Drew grabbed the paper out of their hands to hand me a bunch. I really thought her eyeball was going to fall into my hand. Her eye was cut and there was a huge swelling above the bone at the eyebrow. She had clearly lost consciousness after the fall and was just coming to. Drew ran into the street to move the motorbike out of the way. The women kept yelling at this poor lady. I kept holding her head. A bus stopped, a man came running and lifted the woman up. We ran back toward the crowded local bus. I motioned for someone on the bus to keep the pressure on her eye. People just looked shocked. The doors closed and they took off.

There were at least fifteen people there. All incompetent. They moved the motorbike driver out of the car across the highway and made him walk on broken bones across the road toward us. Seems the driver of the car didn't want to take him to hospital. This guy was in so much pain. His hip was cut bad. His legs were floppy. He was losing consciousness. Then they swung his leg over the back of a motorbike (idiots!) and he almost fell off. I grabbed his back and held him up and yelled at someone to sit behind him. I pointed at a guy and gestured for him to sit. He walked away. I grabbed another guy and he got on. When I looked up the crowd was smiling at us, the foreigners, who had taken over the scene of their accident. The motorbike sped away.

No amount of health insurance can help you in this part of the world if something happens to you. I'm convinced. People are devoid of common sense. Everyone goes into shock and panics and does nothing except scream at one another. We gave up looking for the concrete chicken. I washed the blood off my hands at a local restaurant.

We had a few near misses ourselves that day. A bus driver decided to pass a truck in on the one lane highway. We headed for the ditch. Then a SUV decided to back up into traffic just as we were passing. A woman wasn't looking in heavy traffic, crossing the street. "She's not looking. She's not looking." Is all I could manage to say to Drew just before he would have hit her. It wasn't all bad though. We went to the Valley of Love. We took pictures on the boats. The lake was muddy and waterless. It kinda looked cool.

There were all sorts of things to clamber up on to take pictures. Apparently all of them were clearly marked in Vietnamese with "do not climb". A guy handed me his baby so that we could take a picture. The kid was screaming his head off.