Mini Paris

Whilst in Dalat we visited the Valley of Love, which if the founders of Great Yarmouth had been asked to come up with a "Valley of Love" then this tacky-ish attraction is probably what they would have built! Swan boats, horse and carriages covered in pink flowers and ribbons, hand knitted toilet roll covers in the shape of little ladies (?), heart shaped statues, gnomes on mushrooms (?)...couples strolling hand in hand along the lake. It was just beautiful...NOT!

And so it goes, Dalat is a slightly classier version of the Valley of Love, with less plastic statues, still a lake with couples strolling, trees with fairly lights, a telephone tower posing as the Eiffel Tower, flowers everywhere...you get the idea. Quite a bit different from the hectic Saigon but still characteristic of Southeast Asia in that women still walk about in there pyjamas and whole families are still crammed onto one motorbike.

We fortunately ran into Titi and Hiep here...the Easyriders, guys who have been giving tours around Vietnam for the last 13 years and are very eager to take me and Ayms out on one of these tours. We already had the idea that we wanted to do a five day tour so their over-eager sales techniques were lost on us! We managed to organise the tour we wanted to do, asked some questions and got answers to different ones! Job done! We leave the day after tomorrow.

To fill a day we go on a one day tour of the city and surrounding area (including the Valley of Love) the rest of the tour didnt get much better! We went to Lang Biang mountian and got a jeep up to the summit only to be faced with Vietnamese cowBOYS...young boys dressed in cowboy outfits dragging ponies behind them. Next we went to the dragon pagoda...which is possibly even tackier than the Valley of Love. Plastic dragons, cement dragons, gold dragons, yellow and green dragons, huge dragons, small dragons, metal dragons, pictures of dragons, dragons on the roof, dragons on the floor, on the walls, on the steps! Brilliant!

The Lat village was where we met the village chief who played some music for us on a weird flute and a gong and told us about his village, hs family, his house (he talked a lot). Then we shared some potent homebrew with him which then meant we were his cousins! The most normal thing we did that day was visit the Pongour Nam waterfall where you can swim if you are an eager fan of swimming in dirty water...maybe not huh!

On the way home we were supposed to go to the Ostrich farm but weren't allowed in because of the Bird Flu...we weren't sure if they had it or were just being overcautious about getting it so we didn't stick around too long to find out. We took comfort in the fact that the guide didn't seem to bothered about it all!

Then all was left to do was prepare our bums for the next five days of sitting on a bike....good luck with that one :)