A crazy wonderful house in Dalat

Two days ago I explored a house that was a mix of a tree, a tree house, a termite mound, a ski lodge, a Las Vegas casino and Viet Cong tunnel.

I got there just as dusk was falling so had to run around taking photos in the waning light. The house – it’s called Hang Nga Crazy House – is in Dalat and was designed by a woman called Mrs. Dang Viet Nga, my hero! (And the daughter of Uncle Ho's successor, Truong Ching.) I wish more architects felt so unrestrained. It would be so easy to decorate our streets with odd, ingenious and perhaps tacky buildings (the last quality a potential liability with architectural creativity), but we (as in most cultures) sadly remain sticklers for the conventional and drably traditional.

The house (or rather houses...there were at least four structures) unfortunately is not very photogenic. It’s so chaotic, with so many bits and pieces interlacing and flying out in all directions, that it doesn’t translate well into one-dimensional photographs.


Here are walkways above the gardens, allowing you to travel along narrow, twisting branches like a squirrel.

Below is a little gingerbread cottage in the tropical alpine garden. (Dalat's altitude is 4,920 feet above sea level and built up by the French who left a chalet imprint behind.)

Here's one of the hallways wrapping around the inside of the bark of a fake tree. The trees were filled with nooks for bedrooms and little studies.


A nook!


Cutlery for the monsters when they arrive.

The mysterious garden, noisy with many belching invisible toads, revealed this illuminated spider's web after dark.

Lots of haunting sculptures around.

A tour through Lena's spartan home

The orange living room. That's old furniture that used to belong to Lena's grandparents. Everything is set very close to the ground.

The kitchen counters are also quite small, they come up to mid-thigh, or thereabouts. Lena has a wonderful rice cooker (the plump white gadget on the far left).


Lena painting.

The movie room on the second floor. Lena has a projector.


My bed!


The balcony outside my bedroom (on the right). Lena's bedroom is on the left.


This pic is for anthropological purposes: I have yet to encounter a shower curtain in Vietnam!


Washing machine, bike and laundry hanging out to dry.

So that's that. I like it here very much and am relieved to have found Lena!

A moving market

This is a little market near Lena's house in the Binh Thanh district. If this were a video, you'd see a lot of squirming going on in these buckets. All the fish are still alive. As I was checking out the specimens, one of the fish jumped out of water and started sloshing around in the gutter.

Those are live lumpy frogs in the net.


I really love the fruit here. I eat the pineapple and papaya chunks with a spicy salt the ladies always serve, presumably for health reasons based on yin yang principles. (I wrote about this a long time ago but am bringing it up again because I am still fascinated by this business of eating salt with fruit! Salt spiced with red pepper no less.)

More pics from Go Vap orphanage

I spent some time with the terminal kids today, as Stephanie calls them, the ones who are waiting to die in the orphanage. Some of them have been in there for years. I am always amazed by how a few of the more alert kids immediately react when a stranger walks into the room, as if they can feel the air shift with your entrance. Their eyes follow you until you connect with them, and then they smile hugely trying to invite you their way. As soon as you rub their tummy or pet their head or pull their ears -- which is pretty much the extent of activities you can do with most of them -- they start squirming and giggling. It's enough, it seems, just to be touched. But I'd say only a third or fewer are responsive (although I have a feeling if you tried to interact, some of the motionless children would start stirring. Next visit I hope to get up the courage to approach them.)


This little boy looked like an old man, and even had smile lines between his brow. I couldn't believe it -- wrinkles on a small child.

This poor boy was moaning and crying. I was too frightened to interact with him, which I feel horribly about. What disease does he have, where he is permanently coiled like this -- Mum?

Hoi An, and its environs, by day

(Note: In my fatigue yesterday I kept calling Hoi An Hanoi in my blog entry below! Sorry about the confusion! Two very different places.)

I peddled around Hoi An yesterday, deciding to explore the local area rather than take a bus to the My Son ruins 50 kilometers away to see some Cham temples and monuments -- what's left of them, that is, after the Americans pretty much decimated the ruins during the war. (A tough decision and I'm still debating whether I made the right choice -- wracked with self-doubt as usual!)

Besides karsts, the Vietnamese are keen on their Cham ruins. (The Champa kingdom extended from central Vietnam down to the southern delta between the 7th and 15th centuries, and the Cham grew wealthy with maritime trade, exporting sandalwood (I love sandalwood incense and perfume!) and slaves (less fond of slaves). Part of the Vietnamese fascination with the Cham people, besides I think the whole autochthonous allure, might have to do with their sensual, enigmatic worships of a form of Shiva Hinduism (Shaivism), which they picked up by doing so much trade with India. (Later, after exposure to Arab traders, many Cham adopted Islam. Fickle. Too bad Christian evangelists never got their hands on them.)

Anyway, that's all about the lost trip I never took. Here's some photos of the lowlands around Hoi An.

My bike!
A little home on the banks of a greenish brown river. The sky is forever overcast here. Did the Cham people enjoy clear skies, pre-smog? Or is this monochrome sooty sky an eternal meteorological phenomenon in Vietnam? I'm going to look into this today. One picture I did not include here is the beach -- it's mind-bogglingly gross, strewn with litter and all sorts of crap. Rather sad. As Laura Winthrop said (the girl who insures travelers against being kidnapped), "Plastic bags have been the worst invention for the planet of all time."

Here's some traditional pottery made in a neighboring town of Hoi An, called Thanh Ha. Ceramics -- much better than plastic.

Little chicks in the market. Other fowl sightings of the day: people carrying chickens and one duck upside down ready for slaughter. And I saw a group of men circled around two red and blue cocks, watching them fight. I stopped and looked for a while -- thankfully, the cocks seemed more intent on circling each other with their necks entwined rather than doing any serious damage. (Although one cock did have a bit of a nick on his back that the other bird kept going for. Mmm, sad.)

Back to lovely Hoi An.