Dalat

We've arrived, with zero sleep, but we've arrived.

Well that journey was not great to to say the least. The sleeper buses here are individual reclining seats. Most of the seats have restricted foot space and so we had to sit at the back and top for Will as they don't have restricted leg space. We were constantly flying out of our seat and my seat had restricted legroom which was even too small for me! But hey we got to the bus station at 3:30am. Luckily I had told the hostel we would arrive at 5am and he had said we can just ring the bell and they would give us a bed for the morning. They were really accommodating and put us both up in the dormitory and we were able catch up on a bit of sleep. We replaced till 11am and then decided to have a lazy day exploring the local cable car which takes you into the valley to see a temple and lake. It was nice and got us out and about. In the evening we decided to join the hosts for their cooking class and family dinner. It was $6 dollars, pretty expensive for Vietnam, but it was OK and we got to meet some other guests in the hotel. After dinner they took us to the night market and Maze bar. Honestly I don't know how to describe maze bar so I've just put some pictures below. Look it up if you have time. It's really odd haha

The next day we decided to hire a scooter in search of the many waterfalls dalat had to offer. When we got the scooter it had only one mirror and the petrol gauge wasn't working. Supposedly this is OK for Vietnamese but we insisted we wanted at the very least 2 mirrors, so he asked us to go to the mechanic on the way and told us how much it would cost. We went to 3 mechanics, wasted an hour and had zero luck. It was nearly 11:30am so we didn't want to waste anymore time and decided to just head off without. To be honest it was fine but we had to just be a lot more careful! It was a really really long day with the furthest water fall being 1.5 hours away. The drive was quite stressful as we were amongst the crazy Vietnamese drivers in parts but it was fun and we saw a lot of waterfalls! In the evening we just ventured to a local eat and ordered a dish we saw everyone eating. When it came it looked nothing like everyone else's and was the spiciest thing we had eaten in months.

Us being us we obviously had to find the nearest mountain and climb it so that's exactly what we did today. It was an amazing day, the weather was perfect, the climb up was really nice with a good mix of steepness and we even saw a weasel like mammal with a yellow stripe eating some nuts. On our way back to town we headed to a local coffee farm to try light blend pour over coffee. It was fun to go but I'm still not a fan of black coffee... For dinner we decided to head back to the hostel after buying Đà Lạt wine and eat with some others who were staying and then as it was their first night we all headed to maze bar to show them the crazy place.

The next day we decided to not hire a scooter... Dalat is pretty hilly so maybe not the best plan... We headed to town to see Crazy House, a couple of temples, the local market, the lake and ate duck with rice soup for dinner. We had quite an early night before heading off to Tuy Hao first thing.Read more