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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!

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Saigon Day Tour

These pics probably belong with the last entry. I’ll sort them out later. I just wanted to get get some of them up or else I never will.

8 million people, 3 million motorbikes. Traffic in Saigon

A whole lot of incence

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It’s been ages since I posted anything. Jade and I have been living and working in London for about 4 weeks and already SE Asia seems a million years ago. I’ve got a backlog of journal entries that I want to put up and it has been quite nice sorting through the diary and typing them up. I will try and get on top of it over the next couple of weeks.

Arival

Everything we read and heard about Saigon led us to believe we would be robbed at knife point the moment we got off the bus. This clearly wasn’t the case. I’m not sure if it’s due to having arrived after coming through Cambodia where there is more desperation for the tourist dollar or if Saigon is more relaxed now than at the writing of the guide books but the city was a breath of fresh air, or rather carbon monoxide. I fell in love with it within 10 minutes of arriving.

Saigon is a bustling, developed city with beautiful tree lined boulevards and busy people going about their busy business, mostly on the back of scooters. A city of 8 million people and 3 million scooters, traffic was obviously off its tits!

We got off the bus and walked straight into a guest house. Charles, a tour guide writer we met in Cambodia, had told us about a place that was just out the back of a convenience store. Literally, we walked through the store and into a mini hotel. After dumping our gear we went across the street for Italian, it was pizza, salad and wine for lunch and it was awesome.

The following day we did a tour of the city. This was a cool way to see a couple of the key sites, get an idea of the place and work out what you want to see more of.

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