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Published: February 13th 2006
Well, since our morotbiking escapades, we headed for the central highlands of vietnam. This sounded liek a great way to hop of the tourist coveyor belt, which seems to drop to drop backpakcers off in every major beach up and dnwon the coast of vietnam. Our bus ride was wprhte the 5 dollars it cosst us to get here. We had front row seats to the countryside - viewing moutnains, rice farms, and capsized pop trucks. Halfway through we traded in our loively rickety small bus for a larger more....comfy one.
As the southeast asaias travellers bible (lonely planet) says, Dalat is roughly 1480 meters above sea level...and belive us, the drive up the windy road on the side of mountian made this very clear. Dalat, though in asia, is verrry european-looking... colourful buildings everywhere, and you can really see the french influence here (we even had coffee at the 'eiffel tower cafe', which overlooks a replica made from shrubbery... it's a pretty town, and many vietnamese also like to vacation here. The first day, we deceided to check out a little bit of local culture and visit the buddhist pagoda...right smack dab in the centre of town. There, we
watched the head monk dressed all in yellow bless a bucket full of eels...hmm. We chatted with a 24 year old monk who told us about his life in the temple... he was so cool...buddhists seem to have it all figured out. The temples just radiated an instant sense of calm...we almost converted. After later checking out the market we decided to listen to out musical inhabitions and bought a guitar (so cheap!)... and we met a cool guy from chicago... Mc Dr. Dan. Well, needless to say, a jam session emerged, channelling the cosmic grooves of eionized water... all the passersby defenitely stopped to check it out! So we plan to meet Dan later in Hanoi.
This morn, we were woken with the sounds of a citywide megaphone - apparently the government likes to wake the city up at 6:30 am with the news! fab! so we played guitar for a while, then went out for coffee, and decided to visit the house of 100 roofs... which is this cafe designed by a crazy vietnamese architect... it's like 5 floor of surrealims... jungles and statues everywhere... made out of paint and concrete... you can get lost in there!
so we had ice cream, and were joined by this really cool couple from holland... we ended up spendingmost of the afternoon wth them... We parted ways, andhung out by the lake, which is the main chill location of Dalat... There, we met a fisherman who enlightened us on life here in veitnam. On the flipside, we enlightened him on life back in canada. All in all it was a very educatiopn 2 hours for the three of us. This encounter was aslo interesting as he was a soldier fighting for the North (He supported communism) side of vietnam, unlike our cyclo driver back in Saigon who fought for the South (he wanted democracy)...two poiints of view.
We had dinner at the market, where Sarah had an attempted pick pocketign from a cute little girl...luckily nothing was in the pocket she deceided to explore. We ended up meetign the couple from Holland once again, and shared a few more minutes of conversation.
Tommorw....Nah Trangggggggg.
(Full Moon Party????)
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Dean
non-member comment
Dalat
Having just visited Dalat for X-mas it brings back memories of my trip and I wish I was still there instead of Calgary. Enjoy the cool weather while you can cause it's hot in Nha Trang. Also, Island tour=Booze Cruise !!