Dalat
"Vietnam's city of eternal spring -- where the air is cool and the coffee is perfect."
Dalat is the anomaly. While the rest of Vietnam swelters, this highland city at 1,500 metres wraps itself in pine trees, flower gardens, and a perpetual spring climate that the French colonists recognised immediately as the ideal place to escape the heat. The legacy of that era survives in crumbling villas, a miniature Eiffel Tower, and a general atmosphere that is more alpine retreat than tropical Southeast Asia.
The French Legacy
Walking through Dalat’s older neighbourhoods feels like walking through a French provincial town that fell asleep in 1954 and woke up in Vietnam. The villas are everywhere — Art Deco, colonial, neo-Gothic — some restored into boutique hotels, some crumbling behind overgrown gardens, some converted into cafes where you drink Vietnamese drip coffee under ceilings that a French administrator once gazed at while dreaming of Bordeaux. The Dalat Railway Station, built in 1932 in an Art Deco style with stained glass windows, is the most beautiful train station in Vietnam and possibly the most beautiful one that no longer functions as a train station. A short tourist train runs to the nearby village of Trai Mat, and the seven-kilometre ride through pine forests and vegetable farms is worth it purely for the absurdity of riding a vintage locomotive through a landscape that could be the Alps if the Alps had been planted with artichokes and dragon fruit.
The Creative City
The city has reinvented itself as a creative hub, and the transformation is genuine. The Crazy House — a surrealist guesthouse designed by architect Dang Viet Nga, who studied in Moscow — is a Gaudi fever dream of organic forms, tree-trunk staircases, and rooms shaped like animals. It is genuinely bizarre and genuinely worth visiting. The night market offers grilled artichokes, strawberry jam, avocado ice cream, and soy milk — foods you do not associate with Vietnam until you visit Dalat, where the highland climate and the volcanic soil conspire to produce ingredients that the lowlands cannot. The canyoneering at Datanla Falls is the best adventure activity in the Central Highlands — rappelling down waterfalls into pools of cold mountain water while the jungle closes in overhead.
The Coffee
And the coffee, grown in the red volcanic soil surrounding the city and roasted locally by small producers who take their craft as seriously as any third-wave roaster in Melbourne or Portland, is among the best in a country that takes coffee very seriously indeed. I spent an afternoon at a farm on the outskirts of the city where the owner — a third-generation grower who had studied agronomy in France and returned to save his family’s plantation — walked me through the arabica process from cherry to cup. The coffee we drank that afternoon, brewed in a simple phin filter on a terrace overlooking the valley, was cleaner and more nuanced than anything I had tasted in Vietnam, and it cost a dollar. Dalat does this — it takes everything you think you know about Vietnam and gently, cheerfully corrects you.
When to go: December to March for the driest weather. Year-round temperatures hover between 15 and 25 degrees, making Dalat a comfortable escape from the lowland heat in any season.