Dalat - around the mountains on the back of a bike

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We were crammed into the bus to Dalat. I was lucky getting a seat next to the driver with more leg room but some people sat in the aisles, and I left my cap on there! So there's probably some kid walking around the mountains with a flash new hat. Dalat is up in the mountains at 1600m so has a climate up to 15c cooler than the coast and we had rain for the first time in six weeks. It's apparently known as the Paris of Vietnam. This is wishful thinking. The cooler climate, a few French Colonial style buildings and the fact that Vietnamese have honeymoons there doesn't make up for the general lack of much going on in the city. There's a man-made lake with pedalo swans, a full on 'love' themed park, a fake Eiffel tower that's a red and white TV mast and there's barely any good restaurants. The countryside around was nice though and parts of the city were nice. We managed to find some decent food although got ridiculously lost with a crappy map our hotel gave us. We decided to take a tour of the countryside the next day with a group called the 'easy riders'. We had a driver each who's bike we clinged to the back of as we whizzed around the countryside. It was us two and an Israeli guy called Yariv who at times acted as our unofficial tour guide with his knowledge of Buddhism. He also had a ridiculous quest for knowledge and asked questions about the intricate details of growing mushrooms and wouldn't give up despite our guides clearly not knowing. The tour included coffee plantations, some views, mushroom, vegetable and flower farms and tasting 65% rice wine and coffee which includes fish sauce in the ingredients. We also went to a nice waterfall and got soaked clambering over the rocks at the bottom. There were also some Buddhist sites including a massive laughing Buddha where (if it wasn't locked) you could go inside and stick your head out of his belly button. We had lunch at one of the guides family's house which was a good spread. The woman kept stroking Hayley's arm, marvelling at the paleness. Afterwards we played games with matchsticks which I could never get the answers to or think of any games to play, if they'd got out the playstation 3 I could've given them a good game on FIFA though. We also went to a nice lake and finally a place called the crazy house. It's a guesthouse themed around nature. The rooms are in big concrete trees and the branches provide walkways around them. It's quite cool for 5 mins but pretty tacky. At the end of the tour they tried to persuade us to take a tour across the countryside for a few days. It would've been good but was way too expensive for us. The next day it pissed it down so we just had some coffees, went to a park when it died down and had some good pizzas but we were ready to leave for Nha Trang which we did the next morning.

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