The Central Highlands - Dalat

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Dalat, home to Easy Riders, Dalat wine, flowers and when we were there plenty of rain!!!!

After a few weeks on the coast, we decided it was time to head inland to the Central Highlands. It was gorgeous up there apart from the rain. We didn’t do much when we arrived, we really wanted to do the Easy Rider Tour from Dalat to HCMC but it was 3 to 5 days which we didn’t have. The Easy Rider Tours are local chaps who take you from one destination to another along the Ho Chi Min Highway across the Central Highlands on the back of very cool bikes, sort of Harley Davison looking bikes, these are the original easy riders. Being Vietnam a lot of people claim to be Easy Riders but aren’t so they turn up on a crappy little mopehead. Anyway due to lack of time and awful weather we just booked ourselves onto a countryside tour for the day from Crazy Gecko Tours, a tad expensive to what we have been getting used to for tours in Vietnam, $25 each.

We were the only ones on this tour and it was great, our guide took us to all sorts of places, we were shown how they grow mushrooms, make silk from silk worms, how to make rice wine, how to make brooms, you name it we were probably shown it. We also got took to these pretty cool waterfalls called Elephant Waterfalls, supposedly the rock formations look like elephants. These falls were crazy because to get down to the bottom you had to climb down very slippery steps and trees with no railings whatsoever, health and safety officers in England would have a heart attack at the lack of safety!!! When we got to the bottom we got to go right under the falls where of course we got soaked but it was great fun.

After this we had a potter around the nearby temple called Linh An Pagoda before heading back to Dalat to go to the Hang Nga Crazy house. This house certainly was crazy, with its maze of bridges and walkways and strangely named and decorated rooms. We spent about an hour wondering around and getting lost before we headed back to our hotel to dry off before heading out to a wonderful restaurant called….. for a yummy Vietnamese dinner.

We so wish we could have spent longer in the Central Highlands, especially we would have loved to have done the Ho Chi Min Trail with the Easy Rider guys, definitely something to come back to Vietnam for. For all those bikers out there it’s a must!!!!

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