Lauren here! I cannot express how much I love seven hour bus rides packed with locals, listening to the harmonious sounds of food being chewed with mouths open to accentuate the beautiful music of half-ground food. I love it! But I would take that bus any day over the buses in India! After this fantastic bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City we arrived in Dalat. We had mixed feelings for heading to Dalat. We were super excited to check out another city but, alas, this will be our last new city to visit before heading back to HoChi Minh which marks the end of our three month tour of Bhutan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But I’m sure we’ll post later on the highlights of our big trip. Dalat is a beautiful city in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
It’s surrounded by hundreds of small family farms, most of which are hidden under a blanket of plastic greenhouse shelters. Dalat also has a lot of adventure activities including hikes, bike trails and canyoning. We had a quiet and fun evening meeting up for dinner with a family friend of James’, Alain. Alain lives in Dalat running a banana and vegetable farm with his friend, Jeff.
The next day we set out with Alain to check out the local produce markets which also have clothing, shoes and other items on the higher levels of the market building. It was very interesting and similar to many of the markets we’ve seen in Cambodia and Thailand. Although, it’s pet shops are a little different…
A great way to get around Dalat is to hire a scooter and check out many of the sights yourself. We spent two days hiring a scooter and one day on an organised tour. Our first scooter day was spent visiting the ‘Crazy House’, Bao Dai Summer Palace, Lam Lake and taking a cable car tour. ‘Crazy House’ was, as expected, crazy.
It’s a funny hotel (though I think they get more visitors than guests) where there are artificial spiders webs in the garden, tree-type buildings with high scary walk bridges over the roofs that have pretty inadequate hand railings. Bao Dai Summer Palace is, like the guidebooks say, like stepping onto a film set… A film set from the 1950’s maybe. It’s the most modest palace we’ve visited with its simple furnishings and basic room set ups. The grounds around the palace are very nice and basic also, with strange fairground style toy statues all around one part of the lawn. Scooting on down to Lam Lake and Truc Lam Zen Monastery we got some lunch by the lake and walked around the monastery gardens, which were beautiful. From the monastery we caught the cable car up to Robin Hill and back, which is definitely worth it. The scenery is beautiful looking over farm fields of flowers.
Unfortunately this time the afternoon rains were setting in so we scooted on back to our hotel for a quiet evening. Later during the countryside tour, our guide told us that due to Dalat’s climate, it’s rainy season for six months a year. And it always rains right on cue around 3-4pm.
James took a day trip out to visit Alain’s farm and had a really good time checking out the farm area and seeing the various dairy processing plants in Dalat.
We ventured out the following day to check out more Dalat farms on a countryside tour as I mentioned before. The guide was really lovely and very knowledgable. Our first stops were at a flower farm and coffee plantation where we got to try some regionally grown coffee.
We also visited a cricket farm, where the crickets are raised in plastic pens for… Crunchy Vietnamese snacks. James tried a few but I gave it a pass. The highlight of the day was a visit to the Elephant Waterfall, which gushed with thunderous amounts of water. We were able to walk down into the valley below and stand underneath the waterfall, but the airflow coming through the rocks near the bottom was so powerful that you only needed to stand near the falls to get saturated. It was great fun and one of the Canadian fellows on the tour actually ventured out into the downpour and came back very, very wet. We also visited a silk farm and saw the process of silk being made: from caterpillar to cocoon to hot butter to spinning machines. Very interesting, especially the boiling in hot butter part. Apparently that’s another fantastic snack also. Our final “farm” was really a room of cages where they feed weasels coffee and bananas so that the weasel digests the coffee beans and through the process of fermentation, the weasel poops out the beans which have apparently “improved” in taste quality… We skipped the poop coffee. After a long lunch we checked out the old railway station, saw a steam engine then went on back to the hotel again. Our last day in Dalat was spent on the scooter again seeing the last sights we hadn’t made our way to yet. We visited the Valley of Love which is an incredibly kitsch but fun love-themed park where all the statues are lovey-dovey with pony rides and swan paddle-boats to add to the romance. Instead of holding hands while paddling across the beautiful lake, we decided to have fun mucking around on the buffalo and cow statues 🙂
After a fun-filled morning at the Valley of Love, we moved on to the flower gardens which also sported many kitschy statues, but this time Disney-themed. We saw Snow White and her dwarves, mops with buckets from Fantasia and I’m pretty sure I saw Mowgli from the Jungle Book tying up Shere Kahn…
We had a quick lunch near the gardens while watching the storm clouds begin to roll in so quickly scooted off to see the Domaine de Marie church which was unfortunately closed for lunch so we continued on to a different religious building, the Linh Son Buddhist Pagoda. After a quick visit here, we had to rush back to the hotel in time to watch the rain come down from inside the comfort of our hotel room. Although we only had the opportunity and time to see Ho Chi Minh and Dalat in Vietnam, I would definitely recommend a trip out to Dalat to enjoy its unique, romantic atmosphere.
The Adventures of Lames McFuzzy 