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The bus trip to Dalat was a relatively uneventful affair. A 7 hour trip from Mui Ne, a small resort town we spent 2 days at and didn’t really see a great deal of so won’t bother writing up. If your into Sail boarding or Kite boarding and your in Vietnam check out Mui Ne but otherwise, the beach is too windy for just relaxing at.

Anyway… As I was saying, an uneventful 7hr bus ride up the side of a mountain on a two lane road dodging trucks and motorbikes. We have since seen on the news that there had been an accident in Vietnam (not the road to Dalat) where a bus had toppled down a the side of a mountain.

We stopped at the obligatory road house for lunch, the usual affair of crappy ramin noodles served up to tourists who really didn’t want to stop for lunch. The road house consisted of a restaurant surrounded by a concrete moat with a live crocodile in it. There were also some caged monkeys on hand for “entertainment”. As much as I have loved Vietnam and the Vietnamese people have been lovely, (insert sweeping generalisation and rant) they just have no respect for animals or idea of what constitutes cruelty and it really shits me. How do you educate a people about the rights of animals when they’re barely scratching out a living as it is though?

Enough about bus trips. We arrived in Dalat at about 2:30 in the afternoon and decided to stop fighting and just stay at the guesthouse “recommended” by the bus company. It was nice enough and cheap enough so why fight it, who cares what lonely planet says?

Dalat is a beautiful city in the central highlands about 2000 meters above sea level with a lovely cool temperature which was a much needed respite from the heat of the lower elevations. There is a big lake (complete with cheesy, flower crafted bee) much like Albert Park Lake in Melbourne, in fact most of Dalat is similar to somewhere and feels like you could be anywhere, they even have a replica of the Eiffel Tower.

I know what this lake needs, A Giant Bee!

On our second day, we got up early and decided to walk the 7kms around the lake. Along the way we stopped to watch “black & Red” get thrashed by “The Blues” in the girls inter-school soccer. It was obvious that Blue were by far the superior team and that Black and red’s heart just wasn’t in it. Continuing on round the lake, we stopped at the Dalat flower show which was a bit ‘whatever’ but did have some of the most kick ass kitsch souvenirs I’ve seen in a while. Think crochet nylon Barbie Ballerina tea cosy type of gear. I was already carrying a lamp and two blow up fish in my backpack so alas we didn’t buy any.

I couldn’t help myself, I bought two of these!

Following the walk around the lake we ventured over to the market, bought Baguettesand fresh avocados and headed over to a park and proceeded to carve up a very European lunch with the trusty Swiss army knife. This was a great departure from the usual noodle soup (Pho) fare we were used to.

After lunch we went to the tourist office to see what we could see and discovered that in doing our walk around the lake we had seen about 80% of the sites on their tours. Upon leaving we met Peter, an “Easy Rider”. He convinced us to come on a day trip with him and his protégé Xuan (pronounced Swaan) the following day. It was a little more expensive than the usual tours but would be just the two of us and our own personal guides. If we enjoyed the day trip we could consider throwing away our $5. open ticket to Nah Trang and going by motorbike through the central highlands turning a 7hour bus trip into a three day motorbike adventure. Sounded good to me!

That evening we decided to go to a local steamboat restaurant that I’d spied earlier in the day. The place consisted of a bunch of low tables and stools in what could have been someone’s garage. Unfortunately there weren’t any free tables, as we stood there looking stupid and disappointed a bloke from one of the front tables gave me a shot of banana wine (40proof and made in someone’s shed). I drank it and coughed like a girl. They laughed, we thanked them and looked for another restaurant. We found a place down the road that did us up a steam boat and all was good in the world, for the night at least anyway.

Whether it was the steamboat or the banana wine or a dirty glass, the next morning I woke up sick! Properly sick, where for the space of the next 24 hours I remained house bound while my body betrayed me and purged everything I had ever considered eating. Even a glass of water would result in the kind of loud projectile vomiting that slows down just long enough to say “Oh my god please sto-uuaaaghhhhhh.”. Loads of fun you can bet.

So after my brief encounter with dysentery it felt like a pretty good Idea to strap onto the back of a motorbike for a few days and run around the central highlands. And it was. But that’s enough for today, I’ll write that up soon.

Tags: Dalat, Travel, Vietnam

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 5th, 2005 at 4:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.