Hotel Chau Au Europa Dalat

... the markets and people either stir fry them, put them into congee (thick soup made with lots of overcooked rice) or soak them in rice wine. I tell you, as long as it's soaked in rice wine, these people will eat anything including their grandma's right kidney;
- Bao Dai's palace: this is the last emperor who died in France in 1997 at the age of 85. The guy was quite a playboy apparently, had girlfriends in every port and city and when his wife died in ...

... k*ffe och f*r en l*ng och v*ldigt intress*nt lektion i k*ffedrick*nde, vietn*mese style. En konst. H*n ber*tt*r om sig sj*lv och om sin bst* v*n fr*n Sverige som h*n tr*ff*de i sp*nien, bl*bl*. Inn*n h*n g*r s* s*ger h*n *tt om vi vill t* en m*ss*ge s* s*g b*r* *tt vi k*nner mr B*o s* f*r ni r*b*tt. Ibl*nd *r det j*kligt nice *tt bo lite dyr*re.

... cool watching him do it tho. We then stopped at a ethnic village were the adults dont even speak Vietnamese and the kids are only going to school to learn it now. These people live entirely off the land and were much amused to see two pasty skinned red heads walking about their village. The children were lovely tho and even tho shy were full of beans (heinz being the prefered food of the hill tribes!!). We were then on our last stretch to our camp for the night at ...

... restaurants. Many people speak a little French and there is also a mini Eiffel radio tower, it is nicknamed Le petite Paris. I had some awesome food and we washed it down with a bottle of Dalat's own red wine.

28th August
Woke up standard time (6.30am) had a cold shower (as Mei decided to meddle with the switches grrrrrr!) and decided to go on a tour of the mountains on the back of a motorbike. Our tour guides ...

... caused my new girlfriends to squirm in their seats and counter enthusiastically with "Australia!!!," Tom's home country. Lucky for them, the host didn't know of a single song from Belgium and the girls were spared and Tom was forced to climb on stage and a microphone was deposited in his hands. He spent the next three minutes enduring an awful rendition of some Australian song to which he attempted to lip sync. At this point, I knew I was going to be on stage. American songs ...

... br>thought about learning to kite surf since they have all kinds of
water/wind activities but everything was shut down due to all the rain.
We did have a really good dinner at Saigon Cafe. I got a veggie curry
which was fabulous and greg had a pretty good BBQ both of which were
typical Vietanamese dishes.mmmmm

Things we checked out:


Red Sand Dunes- The
sand dunes are one of the highlights of this trip. There are a ton of
kids ...

... several rows of chairs, and partitioning off a large rectangular sitting area. Oooh, this is exciting! Maybe there's a celebrity on board, or even royalty!

Moments later, passengers begin to disembark the plane but are held behind a glass partition separating the waiting area from the ramp leading to the plane. Hmm...no one appears to be of "star" quality...Passengers begin to pile up when finally the ...

... you were somewhere a little bit foreign.
I liked Saigon... in a nutshell I would say it's a modern city which could be anywhere in the West if it wasn't for the 10 million mopeds, old women in their cone hats selling and collecting their wares etc...

So the next day I got a bus to Dalat... should've taken about 7 hours but took 11... the journey was pretty non-eventful but the scenery and roads reminded me a lot of Northern Laos - mountainous, winding and ...

... of the world's largest exporters of flowers, just behind Holland I think they said.

I can't say that I would have ever have associated Vietnam with flowers before this trip, but it does appear to be a blooming industry (boom boom!), even if I can't recall ...

... pretty horrible looking villages with dirt roads, wooden shacks, rusting metal roofs, it wasn't nice. It had me worried that Dalat itself was going to be a crushing disappointment after hearing good things about it.

By the time we finally arrived in Dalat I think I'd lost the desire to live, let alone deal with the crowd of shrieking hotel pimps waving brochures in my face. After the way I dealt with the first ...