siagon to buon ma thuot

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After leaving Cambodia, I arrived to my first stop in Vietnam. The city of Ho Chi Minh or Saigon was a great surprise. It's a busy city with traffic coming from every direction. It was much cleaner than I expected and the roads made sense. Signs were up along with working traffic signals (big change from Cambodia). The people were also very friendly. I met up with a few guys on the bus ride over and we quickly found a place to spend the night in the heart of the tourist sector.

After getting by bearings together and seeing how things work in Vietnam and the city I took a bus to the city of Da Lat. Saigon’s heat was getting to me and Da Lat is at a high elevation, so the natural air conditioning lured me there. The city is positioned on multiple hills and has a nice look to it. The shops are "cute" and the city has a good feel. The only turn off for me was the amount of tourists there. Vietnam is a very popular place to go to now and Da Lat is the tourist gem of the central highlands area. I enjoyed walking around there, but the constant touts from the "Easy Rider" guides was relentless. It always "tour for tomorrow?" or "5 day through highlands?" It's not bad for the first five minutes, but it gets old quick. I must admit that I did take one of their offers for a one-day Da Lat area tour that was good. My guide Loc was extremely knowledgeable of the area and was entertaining. Good guy. The only thing that a didn't like was the hour long pitch that everyone gets at lunch to go on a five day tour with them. They're deaf to the kind "no thank you" and keep the pressure on.

From Da Lat a took a local bus to Buon Ma Thout further north. This town has only a fraction of the tourists that were in Da Lat, but lacked the scenery. I found a guide (Tam) on my first day to take me to the local waterfalls and to an Ede village. The falls were a good sight. Not huge, but worth a look. The Ede village was small and very clean. This minority group came from Malaysia and Indonesia about a hundred years ago and still retained much of that feel. They had long houses and still spoke a mix of Malay with a heavy Vietnamese accent. It was funny because my guide only spoke Vietnamese and I spoke more Malay than him, so I did more talking there.

Next stop Kon Tum

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Comments

[jimmyjames]

grilled pigeon?
uh... sounds nasty. i've seen too many of those ratbirds in san francisco. was it that tasty?

[Lili]

I remember silk moths! we grew them in school!

[Cihan]

Nice
Awesome scenery. Countryside looks so beuatiful.