Dalat, Vietnam
July 03, 2014
I like Dalat in a strange way. It's a quirky place for sure. At times it hardly feels like it's in Vietnam due to the French influence. It looks a lot like an alpine resort due to the style of the buildings , it looks a bit like the Cameron Highlands do in Malaysia. Yes it is very touristy but mainly with the Vietnamese. It's still on the backpacking route and we did see other travelers but not as many as I expected.
Our first full day there was a very lazy affair. The past few days of riding had been really tough so we spent the day having a small explore just around the centre of town itself and then parked up at a really nice place for some lunch and slowly worked our way through a couple of bottles of wine which was great and very cheap as well at £2 a bottle. It was a nice way to relax and unwind and gather ourselves back together again. We sat people watching and looked up a few things up on the internet before heading back to crack on with the rest of the Jim Beam and then an early night.
The following day we got ourselves out and about a bit more to go and see the waterfalls nearby that we had read about. The most impressive apparently was a good 60km away and looking at the weather as the clouds closed in we decided against it and thought we could hit it on the way out of town the following day so we went to the two falls that are much closer to the town. First up was Penn falls and it was an interesting place to say the least. The falls themselves were canny enough but nothing spectacular. We have been spoiled by 200ft waterfalls in Bali so this was fairly small fry in comparison. What was quite comical is the rest of the park around the falls.
It was like a surreal amusement park. They seem to have one natural feature here then every man and his dog who wants to make some money piles on board and they build all sorts of tacky weird stuff around it. There were a couple of Vietnamese cowboys there trying to get you to shell out for a ride on their horse. I'm pretty sure there are no cowboys at all in Vietnam. They have cows here yes, but they trundle down the road with bells round their necks and don't really need a cowboy to herd them anywhere. Next up was the Ostrich riding and Elephant riding. Neither of which I wanted any thing to do with. The Elephants looked in a bad way and the Ostriches looked very confused and as if they would take your eyes out in a millisecond. On the way back there were a few shooting range things. One was an archery one which I have always thought I would be quite decent at and sure enough I bagged a bullseye and a bottle of wine prize for all of 60p so canny effort there. The shooting ranges and various costume booths were followed by a very random flower park filled with plastic giraffes and deers. Again as with the cowboys I don't recall Vietnam being well known for either of these animals.
An hour later we rode on to Datanla falls to find a lot more of the same. But this one was quite fun. When you first enter you have the option of either walking down the steps and trails to the falls or hop into your own little roller-coaster pod that you scoot off in and control by using brakes to slow you down. Roller-coaster please for me. So off we went down and it was surprisingly good fun. You could get up to a right decent speed but had to be wary of not crashing into those in front by using your brakes. The guy in front of me was a right girls blouse and kept shouting and wailing anytime I got near him but it was great fun all the same. As with Penn falls these were decent enough but again nothing special. We explored for about an hour or so and then headed back up into town and off in search of a Pagoda we had spotted on the way out that morning. We didn't find the Pagoda but had a decent ride around the smaller local areas out of town which was a good laugh getting chased away by dogs when we took wrong turns and ended up in peoples driveways. Once back to town we popped for some drinks and loosely planned the next days ride across to Mui Nei on the coast via the bigger and apparently more impressive Elephant falls.
The next day we got the bike packed up again and started to head off before remembering that we wanted to check out a place called the crazy house before we left. We had read about it and were going to pop there on the way back from the falls but completely forgot so we headed round to take a quick look. The place is really crazy as the name suggests. It's a guesthouse that you can stay in and is still a work in progress. It's designed by a Vietnamese architect by the name of Đặng Việt Nga. It opened in 1990 and it is pure fantasy. Based around a tree design it has rooms to stay in that are named such things as the 'tiger room' or the 'bamboo room' and every one is totally unique. I was really surprised. It did look good on the photos we had seen but it was amazing in the flesh and so much bigger than I had anticipated. We spent around 2 hours there getting lost around the various maze of walkways and stairs and before we knew it we really needed to crack on.
As we came to leave we bumped into another bunch of travelers that were all on the back of motorbikes that are ridden by locals known as the 'Easy Riders'. It's a company that ferries tourists around for a hefty sum to give them the 'Top Gear' experience without the joy of doing it themselves. The guys chatted with us a while about where we were headed and advised that we stay another night and head off early the next day as they reckoned it was a good 6-7 hour ride. They also suggested we take a different route to the one we had planned but in true style we decided to crack on and head off along the route we had planned. I'm so glad we did. I'll pick that up in the next entry and start from there with us leaving Dalat.
