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Published: June 21st 2007
Allison in Dalat
You can see the lake and horse drawn carriages behind Allison We arrived in Dalat after a 7 hour bus ride from Siagon. Dalat is up in the mountains of Vietnam and is amazingly cool! What a welcome relieve from the 85-90 degree humid days everywhere else. To us the 70 degree days and 65 degree nights were perfect. But most locals had on winter hats, jackets, scarfs, and even ski hats.
We were happy to see in this town we had gotten a bit off the tourist path. At least the western tourist path. There were a lot of domestic tourists here and the kids seemed very excited to try out their english on us. Almost every group of kids we walked by yelled "hello". Those we got closer to new the basic phrases... "my name is..." "I'm good how are you..." Allison liked to try here Vietnamese and teach kids some english when they would try to sell us stuff. It was a good way to switch the kids out of sales mode.
The town of Dalat actually reminded us of old Europe and for good reason. It was founded by the french around 1900 and was a completely planned city. They put up a dam to
Flower Garden
Dalat is known to grow some of the best flowers and veggies in Vietnam. create a lake... the golf course was on one side and the big hotel on the other. Now the city has grown around this into a Vietnamese city, but you can still see its roots.
We visited an amazing mountain lookout, waterfalls, and a small village right outside of the town limits. In the town the central market was amazing to walk around and we found a few good places to eat as well.
From Dalat we moved on to Nha Trang which is a beach resort town. Again we found a mix of western and domestic tourists. The beach was really amazing with views of islands in front and mountains all around. Unfortunately it is overcrowded with people selling books, paintings, cigarettes, fruit, etc. It was a bit hard to relax as you were approached about once every 5 minutes or so with another offer. While this did take away a little bit from our time there, we still enjoyed fresh seafood, some more beach time, and a boat trip to the islands.
We also ran into Carl, Jennie, Jocelyn, and Vivan who I graduated from Michigan with. They were traveling in Vietnam going the opposite
Dinner in ??
This was a restuarant modeled after a 1920's french pub. Good eats direction as us. We exchanged travel stories and advice about where we each had been.
From Nha Trang we were off to Hoi An which we had both been looking forward to.
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