Return to Da Lat: a veteran Vietnam correspondent revisits the romantic retreat where he, and so many others, sought respite from war in Indochina.

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-AUG-05

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I often search for traces of nostalgia while traveling abroad, on the theory that delving into the past helps one understand the present. Particularly in Asia, long my turf as a newspaper correspondent, I'm intrigued by vestiges of the influence exerted by Western powers on their empires. I've journeyed to Darjeeling and Simla, hill stations nestled in the shadows of the Himalayas, to poke into the relics of airy bungalows where the British sahibs who ruled India ensconced themselves to escape the ferocious monsoon heat and humidity of New Delhi or Calcutta. I've visited Baguio, the mountain retreat that served Americans residing in the Philippines as a haven from suffocating Manila, and I've been to Bandung, constructed by the Dutch in the Javanese highland to flee the stifling months in Jakarta. When I was reporting on the Vietnam War for Time, the Washington Post and NBC News, as a respite from the relentless sweat, grime and danger of my assignment, I occasionally flew up to Da Lat, the resort that the French carved out of a misty, pine-covered plateau about 200 miles northeast of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Apart from a brief clash in 1968, the retreat was hardly affected by the fighting, since by tacit agreement both sides conveniently used it for rest and recreation. I recently returned there and found that Da Lat still retains much of its old-fashioned charm, even though modernizing trends are rapidly changing the attitudes of at least some of its inhabitants.

Rising to roughly 5,000 feet above sea level, the plateau was sparsely populated by hill tribes when, in 1893, Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss-born scientist with a taste for adventure, trekked into the region. (Yersin, who had conducted research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, later went on to China, where he discovered the bubonic plague bacillus, then ravaging Asia and threatening the West.) The pristine beauty and salubrious weather so impressed Yersin that he persuaded the French colonial administration to develop the locale into a vacation spot. According to some accounts, an anonymous bureaucrat baptized it Da Lat, meaning roughly "the water source of the Lat people." Then, someone with a classical education created an advertising slogan, an acronym constructed from the...

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