Travel Day: Dalat

A considerable amount of time has passed since I last woke up early enough for a sunrise, and given my current location (the guest house is literally sitting on the South China Sea), I decided it was time to bust out the old alarm clock (a borrowed cel phone). The buzzer faithfully went off at 5:30 as planned, giving Jo and I ample time to stumble down to a couple of vacant deck chairs in the pre-dawn darkness. We had originally meant to watch the sun slowly hoist itself out of the ocean but ended up losing ourselves in conversation, sharing stories of our past lives back home and of adventures in places unknown. It was too bad a slight drizzle and the damp chill of the early morning air convinced Jo to head back to the comfort of her nice warm bed, cutting our conversation short. I stuck around for another couple of hours, sheltered by a thatched straw umbrella and watched little wooden fishing boats pop up one by one along the orange and blue horizon.

Not having paid attention to the time, mid morning arrived earlier than anticipated, leaving hardly enough time for me to wake the other two up and pack up all my gear. With a little effort we managed to organize ourselves and check out just in time... to wait fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive late. To our disappointment, the nice big "40 seater" we were promised could barely fit 15 comfortably. Now, far be it for me to over generalize, but honesty in this country is in short supply and today was just another example of it. On a daily basis, we've seen prices fluctuate on the whims of business owners (price tags are virtually non-existent here), promises broken and the truth bent beyond what I'd consider an acceptable level. Anyway, we made it safely to the little mountain town of Dalat, but not without incident. A girl sitting a couple of seats to my left got her puke on for most of the five hour ride. In a last ditch effort from tossing my cookies, I resorted to breathing over a dab of Tiger Balm smeared on my index finger.

The rainy season clouds and precipitation followed us all the way up to Dalat so we crawled under our respective blankets and called it a day. It was actually quite nice.