Da Lat

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So after reading some not so great reviews on Da Lat, right after I was getting really excited to come here, I come to find out... they're all BULLSHIT. Or maybe not just anyone knows how to have fun like us? I mean, we are pretty good at it. Anyways, our first full day we walked around the square trying to figure out what to do. It seemed like all the 'sights' were pretty far distances from each other. We decided to go to the Hang Nga crazy house considering it was the tourist thing to do. It's a plot of 3 to 4 buildings shaped like tree's with different themed rooms (tiger room, eagle room, termite room, etc) and is as if Hang Nga (the architect) had just watched Alice in Wonderland after taking acid when she drew out the blue prints. It was pretty cool, but took a mere hour to explore.

Afterward we walked back towards the city center trying to figure out what to do. And that's when we saw them... TANDEMS. We knew we had to conquer the tandem at some point on this trek, and albeit Da Lat wasn't the ideal place to test our luck considering the busy streets and psycho motorbike drivers, but seeing as we still had a full day we sad SCREW IT (edited to PG form) and hopped on a poorly made 2 person bicycle. It took a while but we finally got the hang of it and definitely got a lot of fingers pointed at us and laughs (probably not with us, more so at us which made it a hundred times more hysterical). Not only were we riding a tandem but we rode it to the rose garden. Romantic right? Anyways, the rose garden was beautiful and we ended up having a blast just running around and taking pictures. These little Vietnamese girls kept wanting to take pictures of Denise.. and only Denise. I was hurt. FINE. I'm over it. We ate dinner, went to the night market and bought some Da Lat wine and coffee. It was a good day.

Day 2 in Da Lat, our plan was to rent motorbikes and try to find Elephant Falls and the Silk Factory. After getting lost 5 minutes after getting the motorbikes, frustrated, on the side of the road... One of those haggling Easy Rider guides came up who we had previously and harshly denied a million times before and asked us if we wanted a tour. Being on tight budget we assumed that it would be $50 each like all the other Easy Rider guides had propositioned. We found out that he was not in fact an official Easy Rider guide, and his own self employed guide and only charged $10 for a day tour. In our frustrated state we said "FINE!" His name was Denis and he saved our day. He took us up to the greenhouses to see how they grow their millions of flowers for all of the festivals and their market (Da Lat is know as Flower City) and then further over the hills and showed us how coffee was grown. Onto Elephant falls, it was glorious and beautiful and we hiked down underneath the falls, almost slipping to our death. We had a fabulous authentic Vietnamese meal and then went to the silk factory. It was pretty darn cool seeing how silk is made. And astonishing how small it was and that it apparently is the only silk factory in all of Vietnam. I bought an authentic silk scarf straight from the factory for 80,000 dong (about 4 USD). Poor moths, but they died for our cute apparel. A good cause. Denise was sad to find out that silk was not vegan. He took us back to Da Lat and offered to take us to the Crazy House, but we kindly refused seeing as we had already been there. He still took us to the post office and the bus station to get our tickets to Saigon tomorrow and was incredibly helpful. Thanks Denis! So all-in-all it was a great trip to Da Lat, if ever in the area, the Easy Rider's are expensive and we saw them on our same route. So if you want a motorbike adventure, shop around on the market.

Tomorrow we head to Saigon and hopefully onto Cambodia the next day!

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Comments

[Maria Luisa]

LOVE IT
What a day you girls had, me too I went to Hayward and came back to Fremont!!!