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Da Lat has a very different feel to it than the other Vietnamese places I have visited so far. In a strange sort of way it feels a little bit like a mini India, the streets are dirty, the street food is great, the people all stare at us and the countryside is stunning. The town has a few highlights to explore; in the town there is a huge lake to wander around, a market selling everything imaginable, a wonderful bakery and great coffee shop. What more could you ask for… but the best things about staying here is exploring the surrounding area.
We are staying at the Pink House Hotel and Mr Rott a brother of the hotel owner runs a 'Secret Tour' for guests. So once again I take to the back of a motorcycle, this time with a female driver, Miss Son, who is also helping to lead the tour and is brilliant. It turns out to be a really long day, nearly 12 hours, so definitely value for money. Mr Rott is the most enthusiastic, slightly strange, weirdly funny man I have ever met and the tour definitely would not have been the same without him. Miss Son is lovely also very funny and the talk she gave us on Vietnamese culture was the most bizarre, weird, very interesting talk I have ever been to. Along the way we visit a Silk Worm factory (so interesting learning and seeing about how silk worms are used to make silk and the machines used in the process), a local market (tasting lots of local food and seeing the selling of dog, cat, fish, fruit, vegetables, everyday goods and everything in between), a mushroom farm and a cricket farm (where we ate crickets, one was enough for me although it had no taste but the idea of legs stuck in my teeth gave me shivers). Maybe the highlight of the trip was a visit to the family home of Mr Rott, we had lunch prepared by his nun sister who lives in a house next door, we also tried all different types of fruits from the garden, many of which I had never seen or heard of before. A very special part was walking through the village Mr Rott grew up in and stopped to visit a local family. Our group all crammed into the one room the family owned, with Mr Rott and 5 members of the family. It was a truly unique experience, the way everyone was kept involved in the conversation was a very impressive display of good tour guiding, switching between the local mountain language of the family to English for us. The family showed us how they spin cotton and make clothes on a kind of hand held loom.
On our last morning before moving on again, we visited the Crazy House, which was indeed very odd. It appears to be a hotel built to look like it's in a huge tree, I think it is under renovation so there seemed to be building work going on but I image when it is finished it will be quite an amazing place to stay, not to mention expensive.
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Mum Sounds great Christy, would've loved to have been there! Is that Miss Son in the photo with you? xxxx