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We've enjoyed our first week's stay in Da Lat, Vietnam. Da Lat is in the Central Highlands of Vietnam - have a look at our travel map at the bottom of the Profile page. Da Lat was established by the French 120 years ago as an escape from the heat of tropical Vietnam. Da Lat has a temperate climate around 23 degrees all year round during the day. This makes for perfect conditions to grow fruit, veg and flowers. We are here at the end of winter, so it is warm in the day and cool (11-14 degrees) overnight. Brrr.. we need a cardy in the evening.. not that we are going to get any sympathy from back home! Da Lat is a resort built around a lake, designed with parks, boulevards and villas. It is set against the pine forested hills of the highlands, however, the Vietnamese are doing a good job of burning these down (see video from Lang Biang). Tourists only tend to stay a couple of days, but we are staying for two weeks over Tet. Tet is the Vietnamese New Year and falls on 30 January this year. We are hoping the celebrations will be fun.
We have done so much this past week, we did a cable car ride out through the hills to a Buddhist shrine, Tuyen Lam, with tranquil gardens ringing with wind chimes. The shrine was near a lake so we had a solitary walk out to that. The tours tend to do a one way trip on the cable car, a twenty minute stop at the shrine then back on the bus. We made a day of it and it was great.
On Wednesday we visited a place known as the Crazy House - this is the folly of a Vietnamese architect. On her website she says
"Since the end of the last century till now, nature and the environment have been too much destroyed; and human beings have taken the consequences of what they have done. For this reason, as a Vietnamese architect, I would like to bring people back to nature to be more friendly with it, to love it; not just to make full use of it, then destroy it as people in many places of the world including Viet Nam have been doing."
What she has managed to create, though, is a Disney/Gaudi-esque complex made entirely of concrete. It is great fun though, there are tunnels, rooftop staircases (without handrails) and it really is barking mad. It is a working hotel and you can stay in the hobbit hole rooms, each one originally designed. I loved it. There is a video of it on Crazyhouse dot vn. We also visited Cam Ly waterfalls that day in the centre of DaLat - they have managed to turn that natural beauty into a bit of a concrete themepark too. We managed to also squeeze in a visit to the French quarter, a street of restored or abandoned French villas overlooking DaLat.
Our hotel is a Best Western, which we got for the bargain price of £19.50 per night including breakfast, it also has a gym. Paul and I weighed ourselves on the gym's scales. Paul has now lost 18lbs - this time through exercise and the south east asian diet - not illness like the last trip. I have lost absolutely nothing grrrr...!
On another day, we headed out to Datanla falls. We got a local bus from the centre of town. You take a toboggan ride down to the first set of falls through the forest - cool! I let Paul go first as I knew he would probably go faster than me. After a fast start, there was a bit of a jam - several cars in front couldn't quite get the handle of "lever goes forward to move, lever goes back to brake". You are supposed to keep a distance of 25m from the person in front of you. Someone should have told the people behind me. Full speed and at full force they crashed into the back of my stationary car - the air was blue. Paul had stopped some distance in front of me and watched helplessly as they sped into me. Paul shouted fiercely at the woman, who had let her young son drive, she nervously asked if I was O.K. clearly she understood english, but I hope she didn't understand those words. We cautiously finished the ride and the woman rushed over to me to apologise - I was a bit wobbly and my neck and head were aching.
The falls were very busy, another popular stop on the Da Lat day tour. We walked down through the forest to the second set of falls and paid to go down to the very bottom using an elevator. This was heaven, the tours don't come down to this level. We were able to enjoy the blue skies, the smell of pineforest and the rushing sounds of the mesmerising waterfall. We sat there for an hour soaking up the atmosphere. See short video. A very cheap day at around £6 for the two of us including bus fares, entrance fees and toboggan ride.
On Saturday, we took a train ride from the DaLat Ga (presumably from the French gare). Many of Vietnam's railway lines were destroyed through air bombings and guerilla tactics and only a 7km track from this line and the railway station remains.
There is a steam engine on one track with a carriage attached, this has been converted into a cute cafe, playing Abba Gold on a loop. Abba is very popular at this time because of their song #Happy New Year#. Vietnamese tourists clamber over the engine for photo opps. This is also a popular venue for wedding photos, we saw two sets of couples here. The working train has the original carriages, but only a diesel engine. The train journey was 124k Vietnamese Dong each - around £7.20 for the two of us. The train travels to Trai Mat a rural town. The journey takes you through DaLat's suburbs and through hills crammed with vegetable terraces and greenhouses. There is a 45 minute turnaround for the return train, with no guarantee of any later trains. Most people head straight for the Linh Phuoc Pagoda in town and rush back for the train. We decided to go for a walk through the town to the hills beyond, we had looked it up on Google maps. We took a little dirt track cutting through the town cemetary to a great viewpoint across distant mountains and over vegetable terraces only 20 minutes away. We then headed back to the pagoda. Although the train passengers had since left, it was still busy with coach tours. Holy moley - it was a sight to behold - see Paul's photos. It was a multi-storey pagoda decorated with concrete dragons. The concrete was inlaid with glass and pottery shards. There were two giant 50 foot Buddha statues and at every turn there was some other bizarre statue of some sort. We were in luck, there was a later return train, which we took after a brief Ca phe sua nong break with the locals (hot coffee with condensed milk again!). Our cheapest coffee yet at 6,000 VND (17p per cup). I asked for our drinks in Vietnamese and prompted one of the guys in the cafe to start chatting away to me - I had to quickly explain that I couldn't really speak the language.
Our last adventure this week was a hike up Lang Biang. We took a local bus ride to the town of Lang Biang. Locals have painted white horses to look like zebras - weird stuff! We walked for 45 minutes up a steep road to the start of the trek. The trek is up to the Lang Biang peak 2187m. Locals took jeep ridess up to a viewpoint - the jeeps went at the customary speed of "too fast". Only westerners walked and did the hike. To do this as a tour would cost $30 each - this includes transport there, a tour guide, entrance fees, a bottle of water and a picnic lunch. Budget travellers, like us, manage to do it for £3.73 for the two of us including entrance fees, water and transport. Once you reach the trail it is 4.3kms through the forest. The climb has steep paths and steps that are a foot high in parts. It took us an hour and a half to get up there and the views were stunning. The hills were lit with fires and the future of this beautiful forest looks very uncertain. Nearby hills have been deforested to make way for vegetable terraces - very sad! Well that sums up a very busy eight days. Thanks for your messages as ever and thanks for following us.
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