Shanghai VS.

I had no idea what Dalat was before I got there. I had never heard of it before I realized I had bought a ticket to it in my hop on hop off bus tour. Dalat is a town north of Saigon in the mountains. Lets just say the bus I was on struggled to get up that mountain. We must have been going under 20k/hour, air con shut off to reserve power for the engine, other buses and cars whizzing by us. It was a slow journey. We finally got in at night. I booked it over to the Peace Hotel 1 with a couple from the UK I had been running into and were on my previous bus journey. Attached to the Peace Hotel is the Peace Cafe where we met some easy riders. The easy riders are a gang of travel tour guides famous in Dalat for taking tourists on motorbike sightseeing tours. They provide you with books they have filled with glowing review from other travelers. We decided to leave the next morning at 8 or 9 with a driver each.

Now, its hard to describe a day lie this accurately. So before I go into depth let me start by saying this may have been my favorite day in Vietnam. It was amazing. And for what? I’m not really sure. It was a beautiful day and I spent it on the back of some fairly uncomfortable bike. But god damn it was a hell of a ride.

The drivers take you to lots of places you would never think to go to, mostly agricultural. The entire mountain town seems to subsist off of tourism and agriculture. The first place we went was where the seedlings for various veggies are planted. The women there had to put seeds in every small compartment of all those trays. It looked pretty tedious. Interesting to see though. The seedlings are then left to grow there for a little while until a farmer comes and buys them buy the tray to plant in his farm. The lighthouse where they are first grown is made of bamboo and plastic. Much cheaper than the western glass alternative.

The farmers also took us to see a strawberry field. We got to pick out our own strawberries from the ground and got a huge bag full for around 2 dollars. After lunch (Pho, of course) our easy riders showed us how the Vietnamese eat strawberries for dessert. Despite how sweet they are they chopped them up, put them in a cup and mushed them up a little with sugar. Delicious.

Also on the tour was a couple of silk worm stops. The first was in the back of someones house and just had tons of silk worm cocoons After seeing that we also went to where they turn the silk cocoons into actual silk. Pretty cool stuff. I ate a boiled silk worm that came out somehow in the process. Pretty gross.

Also on the day trip was some sweet waterfall, a back alley rice wine “factory”, and a place called the crazy house. Also intertwined in the mix was some bits of history, the areas role in the Vietnam war, the effects of agent orange on local agriculture, and currently what changes the city is going through. All in all a hell of a great day in some unsuspecting places.

Tags: Dalat, Travel, Vietnam

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:23 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.