Falling in love with Dalat

Dalat is Vietnam's Shangri-la, or at least it would dearly like you to think so. And on a crisply sunny morning early in the year it indeed feels very attractive. After a breakfast of raspberries and cream, croissants and the local coffee, you emerge into the dryness and brilliance Dalat shares with some of Asia's other choice upland destinations - Kathmandu or Manali, or Alishan (阿里山) perhaps. Dalat, at some 1,400m, doesn't match Alishan's altitude, but it's a much bigger place, a small city set on a broad plain flanked by low hills, strangely temperate for tropical Vietnam, and hence the venue of choice for local honeymooners. It's a true retreat, and its prime characteristics are flowers, lakes and waterfalls.

You can fly there from Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) very cheaply with Vietnam Airlines at US$29 for the 40-minute flight. Or you can take the eight-hour bus ride for US$6, with the forested hills becoming more and more impressive the higher you climb.

Mornings are Dalat's best time. The chilly dawn is soon warmed by a hot sun, so that the locals wear their anoraks against the quickly burning sunlight as well as against the cold in the evenings. You can ride on a motorbike in the intense, clear light past jacaranda flowering blue against the even bluer sky, and feel the exhilaration of a fine May morning in the English Lake District. The landscape is a patchwork of green and brick red, with thin lines of smoke rising into the serene stillness. I was driven last month on a rented motorbike (US$4 a day) past strawberries, broccoli and vast piles of cabbages towards the twin peaks of Langbiang, as gladioli and branches of pink blossom were being cut in anticipation of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

Access to the mountain's summit (2,169m) is problematic. You can be taken by jeep for US$10 to a low peak, Dankia Hill, marked by a red radar mast, with various attractions along the route - a hotel in the forest, a display of Chinese song and dance, an orchid garden by a river. But access to the two higher peaks involves some serious hiking because of the overgrown nature of the terrain and is best tackled as part of a group.

Returning to Dalat in a midday that could easily be an English summer afternoon, you're struck by the smell of animal dung, the hollyhocks and the terraced hillsides topped with pines. Even a Vietnamese funeral, with its gaudy hearse and brass band playing American laments, couldn't detract from the atmosphere of ease and contentment.

Dalat itself clusters round an artificial lake, Xuan Huong, and visitors ride round it (40 minutes) on ancient but sturdy tandem bicycles. The city itself is marked by its churches and pagodas, smart beauty salons advertising Pierre Cardin, dim Internet cafes and men struggling up hills with wood for nighttime fires. But most of all, as with much of the rest of Vietnam, what time and again catch the eye are the brilliantly painted buildings - orange, vermilion, blue and vivid yellow, visual poems made all the more memorable by the purity of the light.

Vietnam's new-found prosperity, although still patchy, is everywhere evident in Dalat where so many of the rich maintain holiday villas. As for hotels, there's an abundance, from the Sofitel Dalat Palace (www.sofitel.com; telephone: 84-63-825444; from US$280 a night) downwards. This grand old dowager among hostelries is perched on a low hill overlooking the lake. Its chosen style is the renovated antique, and if you happen to visit when the guests are taking breakfast on the balcony you'd hardly be surprised to see David Beckham or Bill Gates sipping an apricot juice or getting to work on a home-made yogurt. Polished floors, paintings in heavy gilt frames and old-fashioned bathtubs rub shoulders with a quick-connection business center. Billiard balls click quietly as the guests - almost all, it seems, foreigners - stride up to their rooms to admire the view of the lake once again, and pour themselves a morning cognac from the Minibar.