It was the orange blossoms of the breadfruit trees that excited the driver. We had driven for two hours, nearly halfway from Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam’s central highlands, in silence. But now he was smiling and gesturing wildly out of the car window.

            At first, I didn’t know what he was pointing to. All I could see outside the car was the usual road bustle. Motorcycles and scooters burped and bleated past bicycles and oxen-drawn carts stacked with sacks of rice and vegetable crates. Crowded, dilapidated DesSoto buses raced in cartoonish jumbles of beeps, bright paint, bags of produce, arms and heads, lichees and bananas and more beeps. Women wearing traditional cone-shaped hats laid swaths of bark and roots along the road to dry in the midday sun. Behind roadside stands, young women and children sold soup, French bread, lottery tickets and fruit drinks.

Then I saw them: dozens of tall trees shading the road with a canopy of green and orange. “Breadfruit trees?” I asked. “Yes, yes. The flowers,” said Tam in broken English. “They appear at the start of summer so they remind me always of the end of school and summer holidays in Dalat.”

            Even after a week of wilting, sultry summer days in Ho Chi MInh City, the thought of a cool mountain retreat alone wasn’t enough to lure me 200 miles north to Dalat.

            What finally persuaded me to make the trek was the Vietnamese people I met. From cyclo drivers and watiers to shop merchants and wealthy businessmen, the mere mention of this French-built resort-once called La Petite Paris- drew wide smiles and long nods. They spoke of French villas overlooking a lake or nestled on hillsides among stands of pine trees, of refreshing mountain forests and water falls. And, like Tam, they spoke of childhood vacations full of paddleboat rides, sweet candies and endless play.

            The second enticement – and what proved the most irresistible temptation for me-was that I had been forbidden to go to what was often called “the most delightful city in all of Vietnam”. That’s because I was an American traveling alone and not with the state-sanctioned tours to Dalat. To the Communist official responsible for handing out travel permits to a place whose minority mountain tribes often conspired with the Americans during the war, this certainly spelled CIA.

            I learned all of this from Tam, an unemployed engineer whom I hired to drive me around the country. He had agreed to take me to Dalat and back for US$120. The only problem was securing a permit, which at the very least I would need for accommodation. I had been struck by how much Vietnam had progressed since the end of the war and it seemed odd to be restricted from visiting such and unrestricted place.

            Odder still, my third request for a permit was granted by the very bureaucrat

Who had turned me down the previous two days. “The government’s practices change with the wind,” Tam said. “We do not try to explain them.”

            The road to Dalat, sealed and nearly straight, was a welcome relief from the congestion of Ho Chi Minh. Mile after mile unveiled picturesque images of rural Vietnam: verdant fields flecked with oxen-drawn ploughs and with farmers in conical hats; white ducks feeding along small streams; bags of rice moving to and fro atop buses, bicycles and boats; and vigorous markets and villages that lure visitors to stop.

            The soundtrack surprised me. From the car radio and village cassette players, I was surrounded with soft, romantic pop songs and instrumentals. I hardly expected to wander through Vietnam listening to the apocalyptic screams of Jim Morrison, but who would have imagined Karen Carpenter crooning “every shing-a-ling that they started to sing…”

            As we approached Dalat, the road twisted and rose between bush-clad mountains which poked through the clouds, beside cool forests and valleys and past acres of tea plants blanketing a rich, red soil.

            After such a journey, the only disappointment seemed to be Dalat itself. Its grand, ochre-coloured villas and town centre, except for the Vietnamese names, could easily have passed for a village in France. But its charm was seemingly a thing of the past.

            The villas suffered from neglect, the town from overcrowding and the countryside from massive deforestation, a widespread problem across Vietnam. The lake-more like a large pong-didn’t offer much either, just a place where honeymooners hired swan-shaped paddleboats and which families watched from two outdoor cafes.

            “ Are you sure this is Dalat?” I asked Tam as we drove up to a guesthouse overlooking the lake. “Yes,” he replied. “It has changed,”

            I decided then to leave as soon as possible, but in the morning I changed my mind. For as I strolled along the  pine-covered hillsides, beside a medieval cathedral and around the markets teeming with fresh vegetables and food stalls, I saw something I hadn’t seen before in Vietnam-the Vietnamese at play.

            Wherever I’d been, from morning to night, people were always hard at work: farming, fishing, building houses, moving goods and selling their wares. So the chance to see another, lighter side was irresistible.

            Dalat has always been a refuge .The French and other Europeans came here at the turn of the century to escape the summer heat of Saigon and the coastal plains. Then it was the turn of Vietnam’s ruling and moneyed classes. Now the town draws more than 300,000 Vietnamese tourists each year-many of them honeymooners.

            It was even saved from the ravages of the war, thanks to a tacit agreement between North and South that kept the fighting away from Dalat and , the story goes, the city safe enough for enemy officers to relax in at the same time.

            No place better illustrates Dalat’s popularity than the Valley of Love, an  entertainment park of sorts set among rolling green hills and  a tranquil lake. I arrived there on the first morning of the school summer holiday, ad buses from HO Chi Minh and all over South Vietnam unloaded hundreds of passengers outside the park entrance.

            Everyone wore their Sunday best. The women and girls were dressed in white, yellow and pink traditional silk dresses. Many strolled around the grounds clutching colourful parasols. The men wore ties, sunglasses and freshly polished shoes and arranged their families for photographs around stuffed bears and fawns on the lakeside boats.

            Children munched on local delicacies, such as berry jam and cocoa wafers, and giggled at a bunch of showy cowboys who smiled and posed on horseback like Vietnamese versions of Roy Rogers.

            Even Tam seemed transformed. He’d spent most of the drive to the Valley of Love telling me how the Communists had ruined the idyllic Dalat of his youth; how forcibly resettled Northerners had tainted it by ravaging the forests and building eyesores; how they cared more about making money than preserving their heritage. But at the Valley of Love, he smiled and cajoled me into taking pictures and eating berry jam.

            My second day was also full of small revelations. In the morning, I rambled through the holiday palace of Bao Dai,Vietnam’s last emperor, who reigned until 1945 . Set in a grove of pine trees near the town centre, the French-designed palace hardly ranks among the world’s top 10, but it’s full of interesting artifacts and offers a refreshing testament to Vietnam’s regal past.

            Later, I visited a Buddhist nunnery outside town. Women with shaved heads wearing gray habits prayed in ad shaded courtyard. The sound of gongs filled the air as I sat drinking artichoke tea with and elderly nun who told me of re-education camps and Communist persecution.

            In the evenings, there was music, At my small hotel the proprietors and their friends waited for the guests to retire, then gathered around a piano to play Mozart, drink wine and sing traditional Vietnamese songs.

           On my last night in Dalat, I lay in my room and listened. A cool mountain breeze slipped through  the French window, a mosquito whirred and weaved out of reach, and it came to me how wrong I was about Dalat. It was neither the idyllic resort nor the place of suspicion and subversion I had expected. What is was, for me, was the surprise of Vietnam in miniature.

            There was a landscape full of picturesque, often sublime, natural beauty which lacked evidence of the Vietnam war. There was a rich culture and cuisine and a storied history of conquerors and suffering. And there were the people-warm, proud and resilient-who are anxious and poised to revive their independence and culture from the ruin around them.