Dalat & the Central Highlands
Sunday, June 5th, 2005The 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!
