The House That Drugs Built (or at least designed)

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Today Alastair, Vicky and I took a tour through the hills surrounding Dalat.

Minority People
Our first stop was to visit a minority village. Here we were able to listen to some rather cool traditional music, taste some rather potent whole grain rice wine and try and avoid buying all manner of souveniers. Thankfully the pressure selling wasn't as bad as in some other areas.

Plantatations
Our tour then took us to a coffee and silk plantation. Half of the land was used to grow coffee beans while the other half was used to grow mulberry leaves, used to nurture silk worms. Once the worms develop into cysalises these are collected, boiled (to kill the worm) and then spun into yarns. These are then woven my a wooden loom controlled my ancient looking punchcards - very impressive!

Waterfall
We visited a waterfall...

Shrooms
We next saw an interesting method of growing mushrooms. Bags of compost (or something similar) are hung in a darkened polytunnel, and the mushrooms actually grow on the outside of these bags. Apparantly none have magical qualities however...

Crazy House
Finally we visited the 'crazy house', and architectural expression of LSD. The entire house was built like it was a part of a tree, with huge fake spiders webs, models of eagles and kangaroos in the rooms and bizarre sleeping caves. Very strange - but you can stay there as it is actually a guesthouse of sorts!

About town
In the afternoon I took a walk around town, and was frankly dissapointed. Despite the nice location the town is obviously a victim of its own success. Concrete high rise hotels ruin what once would have been an intricate network or cobbled streets. I did however see a fantastic fish selling bicycle.

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