We stayed three nights in Dalat. Probably from our life in Colorado, we expected a cute little mountain town, but it’s actually a pretty big city, about 300,000 population and quite busy. Dalat is at about 5,000 feet elevation, so it’s much cooler than the coastal areas, which was great. Southeast Asia was in the midst of a heat wave, and Vietnam recorded its highest ever temperatures a couple days ago at 111 degrees F, which was our last day cycling. It was “only” 99 where we were at the time, and Dalat is about 25 degrees cooler. Dalat was the “playground of the French” when they occupied Vietnam, and you see the evidence of that in some of the architecture.
Our home for 3 nights was an apartment off a narrow alley, protected from the street noise. We took it easy the first day here, doing laundry and catching up on various things. We had ridden 7 days in a row, so we needed some rest.
We also needed to arrange our last passage within Vietnam, to the Ho Chi Minh (HCM) airport. We had thought about taking an overnight bus to HCM, having our bikes boxed at a shop in HCM and somehow getting a van from the bus station to the airport with our bikes in boxes, but Chris had the bright idea of just flying from Dalat to HCM instead of taking the 10 hour long bus ride! And so, our next task was to find bike boxes in Dalat so we could put our bikes on the plane. It didn’t take long to find a shop that would box our bikes for us for 400,000 vnd ($17 US) so we told him that we would drop off our bikes in a couple hours. We returned back to our apartment and Chris went to get a massage and facial and then we dropped our bikes off. We asked the shop owner if he could arrange a big taxi to take our bikes and us to the airport. Plans all set.
On our initial walk to find a bike shop with a box, a guy on a motorbike engaged us in conversation on a street corner (this is how things are done!), offering to take us on motorbike tour of the Dalat area the following day. It sounded good. Chris and I would each have our own driver on a motorbike. We gave the guy a small deposit and arranged to meet him on the same street corner the following day. And so we did!
It was a fun experience. We went to a number of sites, and then the forecasted rains came as scheduled. The previous day we had experienced heavy rain and it looked like the next week would have rain pretty much every day. We are just at the tail end of the dry season, so I think our timing for this trop has been good. Besides the heat, we have had good weather.
We went to a few places before the rains hit, including a cable car ride, a flower greenhouse, a coffee plantation (including where weasels are used to eat the coffee beans and poop them out after which they are cleaned and used to brew special coffee), a silk factory and a giant Buddha statue that we climbed up. And then lunch and home.
We had some nice food in Dalat too! Best meal was on the last night and we forgot to take pictures.
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