Dalat is a honeymoon destination for Vietnamese couples, so everything is a bit on the romantic side - the restaurants were all about candle light and soft music and wine. Me and Selina liked it for its cooler weather, lack of mosquitoes and kitschy sights - although I have to admit we did seem very much like a couple one night, with me sat in bed reading and Selina watching the football! The best of the kitschy sights was the Crazy House, a bizarre guesthouse designed by a Vietnamese architect after she'd studied in Moscow. It looked like what you might end up with if you ask Guadi to design a treehouse! There were twisty wooden bridges, winding staircases, a giant spiderweb and even a giraffe popping his head out from nowhere.The rooms were all higgledy piggledy and had fireplaces shaped like animals, tables and chairs that looked like trees and funny shaped beds - I'd love to got back and actually stay there one day! We also took a cable car from high up on a hill in Dalat to Lake Paradise, just outside the town, which was very pretty and definitely deserving of its name.

The next day, things took a more adventurous turn - we'd signed up for a motorcycle tour of the mountains with a local group of bikers called the Easy Riders. The tour started in Dalat and ended in Nha Trang, taking three days in total - we figured rocking up on the back of a motorbike hand to beat another loooong bus journey! Our guides, Philip and Su were awesome, both really funny, and they knew so much about the countryside we were riding through - and Su was trying to set Selina up with every young man we met! The journey itself was so much fun, the roads wind up and down and round and round the mountains, and I loved bombing along with the wind rushing past.

We stopped at a plethora of places along the way, including Dragon Pagoda (a Buddhist temple with a giant, Disney-esque dragon outside), a big waterfall, veg farms, flower farms, coffee and tea plantations (interesting fact - Vietnam is the world's second largest exporter of coffee), a silk farm, paddy fields (where I finally learned how rice is grown - i wasn't too sure before! Vietnam is also the world's second largest exporter of rice),and ethnic minority villages. We got to stop and walk a few times, usually with our guides meeting us a few hundred metres down the road. One time when we were walking along we bumped into a group of girls, who were clearly the class troublemakers! They kept laughing at us - I felt sure they were mocking us in Vietnamese. One of them seemed interested in my nose stud, so I stuck out my tongue to show her that piercing too, and well, you've never seen such horrified faces! It was as if I'd just presented her with a dead kitten! They left us alone after that, and we continued our bike ride to the beautiful scenery of Lak Lake, our home for that night.

On day #2 we got to do a small amount of trekking through a national park, where we saw monkeys swinging through the trees, tons of butterflies (which wouldn't stay still long enough for me to take photos) and a couple of cool waterfalls. The second one is the biggest in all of Vietnam, and because it was the dry season, a lot of the rock that was sually covered in water was completely dry, so we were able to climb right up to the top of the falls and watch the water flowing over the edge! Spent that night in Buon Ma Thout, in an amazing hotel - it had air con, a massive bathroom, comfy beds and everything! Philip and Su took us out for some authentic Vietnamese food - bann beo, a kind of blamonge made from rice, and bahn xeo, delicious pancakes which you wrap up in rice paper together with some salad and dip into hot sauce. We ate loads, and the whole lot cost us just four pounds for four people! Bargain...

The third day saw plenty more stops on the ride down to Nha Trang, on the coast, including watching rice paper being made, a brick factory (actually more interesting than it sounds!) and a rubber tree plantation. We were back on the windy mountain roads by this point, so I tried to shoot some video from the back of the bike, but I'm not sure it really did the windiness justice. I was actually quite sad when we arrived in Nha Trang, we'd had such a good few days! And it was a bit sad to say goodbye to Philip and Su too, especially as we knew it would be a long time before we got to undertake a mammoth motorbike trip again.

I didn't have any new and exciting fruit over these few days, but I did try some rice wine... which had been infused with snake! (ie, it was stored in a giant plastic jap, with a massive snake also inside it.) Philip and Su only told us this after I'd tried it. There was also some wine that had been infused with goat testicles, but I thought it best to give that a miss!

That's all for now, although I'm just about to write a blog about Nha Trang now as I've gotten a bit behind over the last few days - bad Kimbob!
Kim x