Arriving in Dalat was a shock and a half to the system.......first of all our sleeper bus from Ho Chi Minh which had quite expectedly left around an hour late, arrived nearly an hour early!!! For anyone that has not travelled in asia, public transport is rarely on time and never ever early. So we were thrown out of the bus just after 4am. There was nothing open and no-one to be seen anywhere. So Rebecca and I were left wandering around the town in the dark with our big rucksacks on, still delirious with sleep.

We soon found ourselves wandering into this fruit and veg market, and then sitting with a drunk vietnamese guy who had very little english. On the plus side however, he brought me some hot soy milk which although burnt my mouth considerably warmed me up. Oh, and that was the other big shock......dalat was cold! Like really cold!

Around 7am we found a place to stay- it was a 'cheap' attic room that was actually $15 a night for the two of us. It was dirty, the floor shook when you walked, absolutely no sound proofing between rooms (there was about a foot gap between the walls and ceiling between each room) and there was a hole out the roof, other than that, nothing to complain about.

Dalat itself was a nice little town, where again we did a lot of walking around and also rented a scooter for the day. This time however, we ended up with 2 flat tyres. Considering we had one scooter between us, this was pretty unlucky. First time we were in a small village where we could get a new one quite easily (though it later turned out he charged us 2 1/2 times the normal price, but who would ahve thought you could get a new tyre for $2???). Second time we just ran over a nail but luckily we were nearly back.

Also saw this 'crazy house' and summer palace whilst there, but both were somewhere on the scale of average to poor.