We've had a wacky architecture day. Started off with a buffet breakfast to die for, and I nearly did, here at the Dalat Plaza Hotel, a place that is just too good for the likes of us. The restaurant is a whole floor of the hotel, with a wall-length window through to a bonsai rock-garden populated with kitschy little Chinese figures. I concentrated my attack on the more Full-English type items on the breakfast spread, but I might experiment with the Vietnamese noodle & stir-fry dishes tomorrow.

We walked up the hill some way, to the "Crazy House", passing the central post office's gigantic Eiffel Tower replica radio mast, one of the town's main landmarks. The Crazy House is a treat. Somewhat Gaudi-esque and fairytale-ish, it's been under construction for over 20 years and they're still building it, owned and designed by an eccentric female architect who's the daughter of a former leader who was Ho Chi Minh's successor. It really is crazy - a tangled convolution of concrete walkways, model animals, bird cages, fake grottoes, twisting staircases and uneven floors. We passed an excited hour or so delving into it's nooks and crannies, and I bought myself a quite brassy embroidered red shirt that I'll wear for my next poetry reading.

We then walked across town, along the shores of the pleasant lake that is at the heart of Dalat. I'm glad to report that there were a few egrets and pond herons along the banks, and even a common sandpiper and a scaly breasted munia, a tiny finch-like bird feeding on a reed seed-head. We made our way to the Cremaillere Railway Station, from whence a little mountain railway train rattles off along the tracks a few kilometres to the next village called Trai Mat. We found there wasn't a train until 2pm so we mooched around the station for an hour. Dalat is Vietnam's City of Love, where people come to get married and honeymoon, and there was a young bride and groom there having their wedding photos taken. It was rather funny. The bride was in a big lacy flouncy bright yellow dress, and they had her posing perched on the fender of a greasy old steam engine, and sitting down on the tracks with her dress splayed out around her.

The train journey took 20 minutes, trundling along very slowly yet generating dense clouds of diesel smoke. The carriages had wooden bench seats longways inside them. We only got 40 minutes at Trai Mat before the train went back again, but it was just long enough to see the pagoda there, which was our second architectural wonder of the day. The complexity of the buildings defy description. They were all decorated with intricate designs in broken crockery. There were dragons and people and turtles, and a 3 story high woman made of yellow dried flower heads. There was a 7 story tower with a 7 tonne bell in it that the faithful were tolling with a swinging bamboo mallet, and the main temple was just mind-boggling. Some huge carved-wood fat Buddha figures had me in stitches.

I'll finish this tomorrow - we want an early start in the morning...