The Staircase That Nobody Talks About

The Staircase That Nobody Talks About

The thing about Dalat is that everyone goes there expecting one version of it and finds something else entirely. I’d read the blogs about the Crazy House and the cable cars and the Valley of Love — places that sound like they were named by someone who’d never actually been in love. But I’d also seen a single photo, buried in a Flickr album from 2012, of a staircase covered in moss that led to what looked like a faded French colonial observatory. The comments were turned off. The location was just “somewhere near the old train station.”

I spent three days trying to find it.

Not the whole three days, obviously. I had other things to do — eat bánh mì at the morning market, drink way too much weasel coffee at a place that felt more like someone’s living room than a café, get rained on while trying to photograph the Golden Buddha at Linh Phuoc Pagoda. But every spare hour I’d pull out my phone and scroll through the photo, zooming in on the tile work, trying to read a faded sign.

The second morning, I asked a woman selling dried persimmons at the market if she knew the place. She looked at the photo on my phone, handed it back to me, and said something in Vietnamese that my translation app turned into “many stairs, many trees, not for tourists.” Then she went back to arranging her fruit.

That was the most useful thing anyone told me.

Trung’s Two Watches

On day two, I took a xe om (motorbike taxi) to what Google Maps insisted was “Abandoned Observatory Dalat.” The driver, a guy named Trung who wore two watches — one for Vietnam time, one for “his wife’s time” — dropped me at the end of a dirt road next to a construction site where they were building what looked like a wedding venue. No observatory. No staircase. Just rebar and red dust and a dog that barked at me for ten minutes before deciding I wasn’t worth the effort.

Trung had already left. I stood there, phone battery at 18%, feeling like an idiot.

I walked back toward the main road and took a wrong turn — or what felt like a wrong turn at the time — down a path that ran alongside a drainage ditch. The path curved, and suddenly I was in a different world. The construction noise faded. The air smelled damp, green, like a greenhouse full of ferns. And there, half-hidden behind a clump of bamboo, was the staircase.

It was exactly like the photo, except the moss was thicker and the steps were slick with a recent rain that hadn’t reached the main road. The tiles were a pale yellow, now mostly green, and the railing was rusted iron shaped into leaves and vines that looked like they were growing out of the structure itself.

I counted the steps as I climbed. Seventeen. Seventeen steps that had probably been climbed by French colonial administrators in the 1930s, then by nobody for maybe the last forty years except a few travelers like me who’d seen a bad photo online.

At the top was a door.

The Door That Wasn’t Locked

It was a wooden door, warped by decades of humidity, with a brass handle that had turned green. I pushed, and it swung open like it had been waiting for someone to do exactly that. Inside was a single room, maybe twelve feet by twelve feet, with a domed ceiling that had a circular hole in the center — the kind of hole that would have held a telescope mount. The walls were peeling layers of paint: white, then pale blue, then a shade of green that matched the moss outside. Someone had been here recently — there was an empty bottle of Lavie water on the windowsill and a cigarette butt on the floor that looked a day or two old.

There were faint markings on the wall near the window. At first I thought it was graffiti, but when I got closer, I could see it was something written in pencil, in French: “Ici, le ciel n’est jamais tout à fait le même.” Here, the sky is never quite the same.

I took a photo of it. Then I sat on the floor for a while, listening to the rain start again, falling on the metal roof of the observatory like someone tapping a tin drum in no particular rhythm.

The View That Almost Wasn’t

The hole in the ceiling had a metal ladder bolted to the wall — rusted, but solid. I tested the first rung with my full weight. It held. The second rung held. By the fifth, I was committed, and by the time I reached the top and pushed open the hatch, I understood why the person who wrote on the wall had bothered to bring a pencil.

The observatory was built on a ridge overlooking a valley that stretched east toward the sea — or at least toward the cloudbank that sat where the sea should be. Below, the city of Dalat spread out like someone had spilled a box of red-roofed houses across a green tablecloth. The lake was there, and the cathedral, and the pine forests that give this part of Vietnam its peculiar smell — not quite mountain, not quite jungle, something in between.

I could see the wedding venue they were building from up here. It looked smaller, less intrusive, like a toy someone had left on the hillside. The dog was still barking, but from this height, it sounded almost friendly.

I sat on the rooftop for maybe forty minutes. A couple of times I heard voices from below — other people finding the staircase, probably — but they didn’t climb up. Either they didn’t notice the ladder or they decided the rust looked too dangerous. I don’t blame them. It probably was.

What The Light Does To Old Roof Tiles

Around 4 p.m., the sun broke through the clouds for maybe fifteen minutes. The light hit the roof tiles of the houses in the valley below and turned them from red to orange to a color I’d call copper if I were trying to write a poem about it. The moss on the observatory roof — and there was a lot of it, thick enough to walk on if you were careless — started steaming, sending up little wisps of moisture that caught the light and made everything look like it was breathing.

I took probably fifty photos. Two of them came out okay. The rest are just proof that I was there, not proof that I know how to use a camera.

Getting There (The Boring Part)

If you want to find this place, here’s what actually works. Don’t trust Google Maps. The pin I used was wrong by about 400 meters — which in a dense, winding neighborhood of Dalat is the difference between a fifteen-minute walk and a two-hour detour.

The observatory is in the Ward 8 area, on a residential street called (as best I can tell from asking three different people) Hẻm 59 Hoàng Hoa Thám. It’s a narrow lane that branches off the main road just past the Dalat Star Hotel. You’ll see a small café on the corner called Cà Phê Nhà Cũ — Old House Coffee. If you reach that, you’re close.

The staircase entrance is tucked behind a wall of bamboo and bougainvillea. There’s no sign, no marker, no indication that anything is there. If you see a pink house with a corrugated metal roof and a rooster that will absolutely try to fight you, you’ve gone about fifty meters too far.

Best time to go: any time except right after rain, unless you enjoy the feeling of sliding down seventeen moss-covered steps on your backside. I went around 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. There was nobody else there, and the afternoon light through the trees was worth the wait.

What To Bring

Water, obviously. Insect repellent — the mosquitoes in that patch of bamboo are aggressive and have no respect for personal boundaries. A flashlight or phone light, because the interior of the observatory is dark even at midday. And maybe a pencil, in case you want to leave your own note on the wall.

The Woman Sweeping Her Doorway

On my way back down the lane, I passed a woman sweeping the concrete in front of her house with a broom made of bound twigs. She couldn’t have been older than sixty, but her face had that lived-in look of someone who’d spent decades under this sun. She saw me coming out from behind the bamboo and laughed.

“You find the old star house?” she asked, in surprisingly good English.

“I think so,” I said. “The observatory?”

“Star house,” she repeated, nodding. “My grandfather worked there. Before the war. He said they watched the stars every night and wrote down where they were.” She made a gesture like she was drawing on paper. “All in notebooks. I have one, somewhere.”

I asked if I could see it. She shook her head. “My daughter threw them away. She said they were old and dirty. She was not wrong — they were old and dirty. But they were his.”

She went back to sweeping, and I stood there for a moment, not sure what to say. Then she added, without looking up, “He said he saw the same stars as the men in Paris, but from here they looked different. Bigger, maybe. Closer.” She laughed again. “I don’t know if that’s true. He was old and his eyes were not so good.”

I thanked her and walked back toward the main road. The rooster was still there, eyeing me from beside a pile of firewood. I gave it a wide berth.

Morning Return

I went back the next morning, because I wanted to see the place in different light and also because I’d left my water bottle on the roof. The rooster was waiting. It chased me for about twenty meters before deciding it had better things to do.

The morning was quiet — damp, cool, with that particular Dalat chill that makes you wonder if someone forgot to turn on the heating for the whole city. The moss was wetter than the day before, and I slipped twice on the way up the staircase, catching myself on the railing both times. My palm came away green.

Inside the observatory, the light was different — softer, grayer, filtering through the windows at a lower angle. The pencil note on the wall was harder to read in this light. I almost missed it.

Someone had added a new line underneath the French one, written in what looked like ballpoint pen, in English: “But it’s still the same sky.”

I didn’t have a pencil. I had a pen, but it felt wrong to add to the wall — a pen is too permanent, too confident. I sat on the floor for a while, drinking the water I’d come back for, and listened to the birds. Up on the roof, I found the water bottle exactly where I’d left it, next to a puddle shaped like Vietnam.

I took a photo of that, too. It’s a bad photo. The puddle doesn’t look like Vietnam at all.