On the international tourism dance floor, Dalat looks like a wallflower.
Peel off the cheap labels stuck to her skin. Take her gently by the hand. And brace yourself: while the other spots scream themselves hoarse over novelty dance routines, Dalat glides into an exquisite, skin-to-skin slow dance.
Because everyone else wanted to dance fast.
Too fast. Faster and faster.
A brutal tempo. Snapped stiletto heels. Unhooked bras. Melting foundation. The seams of the commercial dress bursting under the pressure. In their desperation to turn on the tourist, they ended up flashing their cellulite.
Now the bait is limping off the floor.
Dalat keeps dancing.
Alone.
It starts with a Foxtrot.
Colonial eclecticism, regionalist villas, architects brazenly raiding the European playbook. A roofline here, a facade there, a silhouette borrowed from Savoy, Normandy, or the Basque Country. The colony dreaming up its own slice of France under the pines. An elegant, rehearsed, slightly stiff dance.
Then comes the Charleston.
The corset snaps.
Train station. Hotels. Villas. A royal residence. Art Deco shoves the bouncer aside and owns the floor. Geometry, tight lines, bold volumes, sharp angles. It swings, it cuts, it sends the old colonial lace flying.
Dalat is done playing the dutiful schoolgirl from the Couvent des Oiseaux.
She dumps the catechism. Now she’s on the floor looking like Nina Hagen—dark eyeliner, blade in hand, ready to slit the throat of every cliché.
Because Dalat isn’t just this long-gowned colonial romance the travel brochures keep forcing her into.
Beneath the fog, 1960s and 70s concrete breshes its teeth.
Modernism steps up to dance. Lines break free, volumes harden, structures shift. Architecture that doesn’t give a damn about good manners. Pure pogo.
The others are slumping at the bar.
Washed up.
Chins in hands. Lukewarm beers. Glassy eyes. Thighs copping a heavy grope from the fat, predatory hands of mass tourism. Hungry. Ready to devour cheap flesh by the assembly line.
They started the evening playing the uptight princesses.
They’re ending the night as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Gutted like pigs on the pavement at dawn.
Me, I’m walking Gabrielle Vassal home.
She’ll tell me about when this was just a trail through the forest.
Yersin. Doumer. Steam trains. Carriages. Nuns. Bourgeois expatriates nursing their colonial livers. Shady deals. Tucked-away mistresses. Casino bankruptcies. Gluttony. Lethal plantations turning astronomical profits. Adventurers. Conmen. Profiteers. Minstrels. Arrogant, well-groomed officers.
The whole zoo.
Far more dangerous than anything prowling Mount Langbiang.
A greasy soup of greed, sanatoriums, sermons, and colonial carnivals.
Gabrielle spat out that scum. She carried that same dual culture that defines Dalat. And like the town itself, she broke free from the polite society, the etiquette, and the small minds who want to dictate how you ought to live.
Then, by the lake, Gaby offers me one last dance.
Honest to God, it’s refreshing to see someone actually write instead of pumping out that sterile, AI-generated tourist bollocks. The transition from the stiff colonial Foxtrot to full-on Art Deco and 70s concrete pogo? Absolutely spot on. Brilliant metaphor.