Da Lat, a Cool Retreat from the Heat

Currently Listening to: recent episode of RadioLab

After having some leisure time on the beach I took the bus to the mountains. Da Lat is a lovely mountain town with cool temperatures and a thunderstorm every day from about 2:30-4:30. I will be completely honest, I didn’t do much while in De Lat. I decided to spend some time being lazy and wandering around town drinking fresh juices and coffee.

View of De Lat

Despite the lack of notable sightseeing, I will say I must tell you about the hostel I stayed at. Eight of us decided to travel from Mui Ne to Da Lat and find a hostel together, so I booked a room for all of us at Da Lat Friendly Fun. The owners are a sweet local couple that went out of their way in every way possible to make sure we enjoyed our stay. The wife offers a traditional dinner each night for $3. You request it in the morning and she goes to the local market and cooks all afternoon and evening and then serves it to us family style by combining all the tables in the common area together. Every morning you wake up and she makes a massive vegetable omelette. The first morning I woke up and walked into the kitchen for breakfast and saw her unwrapping a massive cake. While processing everyone’s passports during check in on Monday, she saw one of the ladies in our group would be celebrating her birthday the next day. She had called the bakery that night, ordered a cake, and then picked it up early Tuesday morning so the birthday girl would wake up to a cake.

Her husband was just as wonderful. He suggested we eat out at a restaurant that evening to enjoy the local cuisines. He later walked us to his favorite restaurant, where there were only locals. There was actually a table of policemen just drinking like it was the end of the world. He ordered different dishes like snail shells filled with snail mixed with pork, and steak that we cooked over charcoal, and calamari. While eating dinner, we had to take numerous shots of homemade rice wine. It’s part of a celebratory dinner and the owner was really pushing to is to take shot after shot. With each shot of the rice wine we took, the taste went from bad to worse. I eventually wouldn’t even take a shot and would just take a sip whenever he called for another one.

From dinner, he took us out to a karaoke bar, because karaoke is a very BIG thing in Da Lat. While walking there, we ran into another group of hostelers a and they joined us, so that evening about 20 of us “sang”. Our hostel owner insisted on singing first and started the night with a Boys II Men song. I would also like to let you know that he was always a beat behind. He was also the most enthusiastic singer.

It was a long night and I shockingly woke up feeling fantastic.  I decided to take advantage of not feeling awful by getting on the back of the motorbike of one of my friends and rode around town for a bit. The picture above was taken while riding around.

The next day I took a bus to Nha Trang. A beach resort full of Russians. The Russian vacation population is so huge that all signs are in Vietnamese first, then Russian, then if you’re lucky in English.  I decided to spend only one night here, so tonight (Friday the 25th) I’m taking an overnight bus to Hoi An. Tomorrow evening is a big lantern festival in Hoi An and I’m excited to be there.

As for today, I luckily ran into someone I know! Remember how I mentioned 7 out of 8 people made it to Da Lat? Well, I randomly ran into person 8, Brendan, after breakfast. We decided to have a spa day and enjoy a mud bath and mineral pools. We were definitely the thing that didn’t belong. We shared our pools with Chinese vacationers and a of course, the numerous Russian vacationers. It was an odd day, but relaxing and hopefully I get some sleep on tonight’s bus.