[travel] Dalat
Feb. 12th, 2009 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mattbellDalat is a Vietnamese hill town that was substantially developed by the French in the early 1900s, and still has a very strikingly European feel. While Saigon offered me a big, messy primer in third-world megacities, Dalat presented itself as an idyllic place for an independent thinker with a taste for outdoor adventure, Asian culture, and good cheap food to expatriate (to verb a noun). The hilly streets and gnarled evergreens also give the place a very San Francisco feel. The runaway chain reaction of douchebag foreigners begetting businesses catering to douchebag foreigners (and treating all foreigners as if they were douchebags) has not afflicted this city. Perhaps it's the lack of beaches, late-night bars, and easy cheap access by plane. Those all must be catalysts judging from what I've seen in other cities.
Dalat is also home to the Crazy House, a working hotel built by a woman with aesthetic taste somewhere between Dali and Gaudi, but with more love of purely organic forms and random jungle fauna. My friend and I spent three hours there taking pictures, and then I returned the next night and serendipitously met the owner. She built the whole place on the stunningly small budget of around US$1million, which she was able to pull off because her dad was the head of the Communist Party.
In any case, this place is glorious.. May it not be ruined.
I'm starting to wonder if the tourist industry is like the fashion industry in that even good places (and fashion trends) eventually get too famous and then they become overly popular and then take a turn for the cheap and cheesy. Of course, old fashions get discarded while tourist traps continue to trap tourists.
Dalat is also home to the Crazy House, a working hotel built by a woman with aesthetic taste somewhere between Dali and Gaudi, but with more love of purely organic forms and random jungle fauna. My friend and I spent three hours there taking pictures, and then I returned the next night and serendipitously met the owner. She built the whole place on the stunningly small budget of around US$1million, which she was able to pull off because her dad was the head of the Communist Party.
In any case, this place is glorious.. May it not be ruined.
I'm starting to wonder if the tourist industry is like the fashion industry in that even good places (and fashion trends) eventually get too famous and then they become overly popular and then take a turn for the cheap and cheesy. Of course, old fashions get discarded while tourist traps continue to trap tourists.
