Dalat to the rescue!
Trip Start
Mar 19, 2008
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9
31
Trip End
Jun 05, 2008
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Dalat,
Vietnam
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Just as it seemed like we'd had enough of Vietnam (see "Nha Trang sucks" blog) Dalat rides in to save the day. This is a wonderful small town full of happy smiley friendly folk who actually make no attempt to extort money from you, or rip you off - but just want to chat to you and give you a decent service. Just in time, cos we'd about had enough.
Mind you, getting up the hill into Dalat wasn't a bed of roses. Our 4 hour bus trip from Nha Trang turned into a 7 hour bounce-athon over horrible roads and winding mountain passes (which, in fairness, gave great views of the plains below).
The first people who we met off the bus were a couple of Dalat's famous Easy Riders. These are guys who hang around the centre of town on their old restored motorbikes and offer you excellent tours, at great prices, as well as a lot more. Our two new friends found us a great and reasonable hotel for no charge and helped us sort out our flights from Dalat to Saigon.
Of course, we were going to pay them for a tour, but that's not the point. We'd already agreed the price for all that before they helpfully offered to ferry us around town on our errands. They also recommended a brilliant restaurant - the Peace Cafe - which has been the best food we've got in Vietnam - and that's saying something. We also got to chat to the Cafe's eccentric owner - a hyper little woman who babbles at you in broken English, loudly, as she serves her excellent food. She just seems to like telling customers about her day.
So, full of enthusiasm for travel again, we set off early on our tour of the surrounding highlands.
Dalat Crazy House - crazy!
Our two drivers, Mui and Phu, promised to show us the real Vietnam. It didn't start well as we stopped off at Dalats resident tourist trap, the Crazy House. It's just a weirdly built house with freaky paper mache animals in each of the rooms. You could tell our Easy Riders didn't really rate it and were eager to get us out of town to see everything else.It was a great day spinning around the quiet highland hills. They took us to flower growing farms (next time you get a bunch of pansies, I think I'll have met the nice ladies who packed them), private coffee and tea plantations, avocado groves, passion fruit growers and stopped us off at a locals house who made rice wine, grew mushrooms from rubber tree sawdust (!) and had a million cicadas living and singing in his trees.
They took us to the wonderful Elephant falls, and a huge Pagoda with a massive smiling buddha, and stopped off on hill tops to show us the damage Agent Orange, the defoliation chemical used by the US in the 70's, still did to part of the soil - large scars of empty hillside where forest once flourished. We saw locals weaving silk and a little family making bamboo baskets while they waited for the wet season to help the rice grow again. It was great, these were locals taking us places away from tourist crowds, showing us how Vietnamese hillpeople lived. And all this time we got great views and had a good laugh with Mui and Phu.
It wasn't all gain, there was pain too - 6 hours on the back of a bouncy bike takes its toll on the delicates. Lisa's hands must have cramped a fair bit cos she was hanging on pretty tight to the bike when we rounded some of the hairier corners.
When we got back to Dalat, it was time for more great food and a quiet night cos tomorrow we head for the bright lights and madness of Saigon.
