July 21st, 2018
More Da Lat adventures July 21st
The weather here changes quicker than you can imagine. We wake up and notice during breakfast it’s pouring. We are planning an outing to ride a train that goes out of a local station here in Da Lat to Trai Mat. By the tine we get organized it’s not raining, so we skip the cab, and start walking. We put on and take off rain ponchos three times on the walk to the train station, but this is SO much better than yesterday when I got cold, wet and miserable walking in the rain.
This pineapple thing is actually a mall. The mall is all underground and the top is a large tiled public use space where vendors gather to sell food (and squeaking chicken toys and selfie sticks). The green thing is a cafe….peculiar architecture to say the least.
There’s some history going back to early 1900s on this railway, but it was heavily damaged and became unused during the Vietnam war. In 1991 a short 7km stretch was rebuilt and is now used as a tourist attraction. As we see with trains here, you have a choice of “seats”, hard seat, soft seat, VIP 1 and VIP 2. We select soft seats for 125,000 dong to be told that there aren’t any. So we opt for VIP 1, which is 50 cents more each and costs 135,000 dong ($6.75 usd) round trip.
There’s no shortage of Vietnamese and Chinese tourists that appear to be here exclusively to get glamour selfies in every location they can. VIP 1 is a nice padded bench in the middle car and perhaps the free water is a VIP perk!
The trip was smooth sailing, took about 25 minutes one way and they even brought us each a water. At the end in Trai Mat, we got off and I am not 100% sure, but it sounded to me like the girl said “you have 35 minutes which is time for one beer.” Sounds about right i guess. There’s a pagoda that we decide we to go see, it’s about 450 meters from the train, so seems reasonable. We get down there and it looks to be a Chinese Buddhist temple? Not sure, maybe I should look it up. It’s called Linh Phuoc Pagoda.
I did have the privilege of using one of the scariest washrooms I’ve been to in 10 years coming to SE Asia. Not necessarily because of the condition of the facilities itself, but more because of the women I had to battle to actually gain access to a stall. I had forgotten how pushy Vietnamese people are. It is however coming back to me as I spend more days here.
It was your basic tiny, wet, stinky squatty potty but I travel with my own TP, baby wipes and hand sanitizer, so that’s not such a big deal. I got wedged out of a stall multiple times before I realized that they don’t seem to subscribe to the civilized notion of a queue here, when waiting for a stall (or at all). You basically all jam in, pick a stall (‘call it’), get as close as you can, then when the door cracks, barge in to be the first through, thereby securing your access. So I’m getting better at this, as at some point, I get annoyed and am really only trying to get in because it is a true emergency, otherwise, let me just say…..I WOULD WAIT. The same thing happened to me two hours later at the Big C washroom. But I wised up a lot faster and got back in some old lady’s face and uh nuh’d her with my finger after I’d been cut by someone else. It just happens really fast, so you can’t let your guard down. When I opened the stall door, the old lady was right there and almost mowed me over coming in before I’d even exited the stall. I gave her the ‘arm’ and told her with my body language to wait for me to leave. She (AND a second lady) scuttled in right behind me and closed and locked the stall. There’s barely room for one woman can’t imagine taking your bestie in there with you! But maybe that’s how they were going to know FOR SURE that they were next! Going to the washroom is a competitive sport here, where winner takes all!
