Vietnam Resort Reviving Tourism

This mountain town, once an elegant French Colonial resort, is shaking off years of isolation and neglect to attract foreign tourists again.

A Hong Kong company is renovating the 18-hole golf course that was a favorite haunt of Vietnam’s last emperor, Bao Dai.

Taiwanese tourists are renting French villas that were reserved until recently for Hanoi’s top Communists.

And Americans, who have had difficulty since 1989 getting visas to visit Dalat, are welcome again.

“With the help of foreign countries, we’ll develop our economy faster,” said Nguyen Xuan Ai, deputy head of Lam Dong province.

Lam Dong cautiously began inviting foreigners to visit just a few years ago.

One of Vietnam’s three central highland provinces, its sparsely populated forests are home to many ethnic minorities. Dalat, which means “Land of the Lat,” is named for one those minorities.

Vietnam was too worried, until two or three years ago, about unrest among the minorities and bandits operating in the hills to encourage foreign visitors, officials said.

U.S. citizens were a special category. They were virtually banned after a group of Americans in 1989 came to Dalat in a bus covered with banners, met with minority people and offered rewards for information about American servicemen missing since the Vietnam War.

The Vietnamese authorities quietly lifted that ban late last year after Washington began allowing organized travel from the United States to Vietnam, Ai said in a recent interview.

Now, Dalat is opening its doors to all.

Nguyen Dinh, deputy head of the provincial committee on foreign economic relations, receives four or five international business delegations a week in the resort.

Lam Dong province has built several silk factories since 1985 with investments from Italy, South Korea and Japan, and is exporting silk thread to those countries and to Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and India.

The province used to sell tea and coffee to the former Soviet Union. It is now looking for new markets in Asia. It is building a wood products factory with Indonesia and exporting pine resin to Japan.

As Vietnam opened air routes to France, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore over several years, Dalat began shipping out one of its proudest products--orchids, which it used to export to the Soviet countries.

About 13,000 foreign tourists are expected to visit Dalat this year, up from 7,500 in 1990.

Some parts of the town resemble a quaint alpine resort, with pastel-colored villas amid pine trees and lakes. Elsewhere, ugly concrete buildings have sprung up.

Danao, the Hong Kong company that is helping rebuild the golf course, is renovating 16 villas, the Palace Hotel, which once housed the French military, and Palace No. 1, the summer home of Ngo Dinh Diem, the late South Vietnamese president.

Tran Le Xuan, the powerful wife of Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had a summer house on a hill nearby. It is now the state-owned Minh Tam Hotel.

New tiger skins and bear trophies in the hotel’s gift shop attest to the wilds of Lam Dong, once a regular hunting spot for emperor Bao Dai.

Most of the tourists who now visit the resort are Vietnamese who drive 190 miles north to escape the heat and noise of Ho Chi Minh City.

Thousands of Vietnamese tourists poured into Dalat during February’s Tet lunar new year holiday.

A favorite spot of the locals is “Love Valley,” where they rent boats on a lake or have their photographs taken on horseback next to young Vietnamese men dressed in cowboy outfits.

The U.S. military spent a lot of time in Dalat during the Vietnam War, but the “cowboys” say their outfits have no connection with that time.

Nguyen Kim Thao, a teen-ager in a white leather hat, said the Western gear was a product of local ingenuity that the Vietnamese and Taiwanese tourists were mad about.

“We just saw it on TV,” he said.