Vietnam Day 4 - Dalat

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Ah. How come I still have one post left.. zzz.

Ok. Let's get this over and done with! This is our 2nd day in Dalat. I love the little courtyard in Empress Hotel that overlooks Xuan Huong lake, and even has wifi. Too bad we were only staying for a night.

Breakfast was okay.. and here came our Easy Riders! yay.

They said that big luggage was no problem.. and they were right. They easily tied our luggages to the back of the bike with strips of tyre rubber. Now we have backrests!

some marketing for them.


da lat city, while we were drawing $ from a bank









school children doing their morning exercises


1. Chua Linh Phuoc temple


the whole temple's walls are made up of a colorful mosaic of broken beer bottles and porcelain bowls!








fantastic views from the top of the temple




2. Cable Car ride







i bought this silly horn from the cable car souvenir shop. musical instrument from vietnam, check. sadly it has a huge crack.. should have wrapped it nicely b4 putting in my luggage =(


3. Tuyen Lam Lake




4. Bonsai Garden

5. Truc Lam (Bamboo Forest) Zen Monastery. Ok I cheated. The lake, bonsai garden and the monastery are all in the same area. Oh, in fact they are all next to the cable car station! Fantastic views nonetheless.

6. Datanla Falls. Today we truly understood the difference between unspoilt nature and tourist destinations. Today's places were full of souvenirs and admission tickets, unlike yesterday's country tour. Even this waterfalls had admission tickets and lots of touristy nonsense. Well we only had about half a day so we're lucky to be even seeing anything so we weren't complaining.

5000d = 40 cents. after a very very long walk down..






why there is a horse and why we are in cowboy suits in front of the waterfalls, do not ask.



and there's this rollercoaster that you can sit down to the bottom of the falls and up! too bad we had walked all the way down already so we could only go up. It's kinda like the luge at sentosa.




up we go! beats having to walk all the way back up. didn't go down again cos we would have to go up again (!?)



while pb was lazing in his hammock, tintin pulled me over and showed me.. elephant mountain


7. chicken village. this is the minority village that hung termed as 'touristic' yesterday.. and full of shops.. yeah there were some shops but it was ok..


8. silk weaving

the nice lady sat us down and served us tea.. after which they showed us how they weave patterns into their silk. we were a lil worried that they would start forcing us to buy their stuff but they were pretty gentle and nice.. didn't hardsell us too much. I really wanted to get something but didn't see anything I like. On hindsight luckily i didn't buy anything.. haha.

poor monkey is chained to the tree and it looked really, really sad. =(


chicken! the legend is that some guy had to find a chicken with 9 spikes at its feet in order to marry his love.. he never found it though. so here it is.



this is a hospital set up by an ang moh called Linda Burns. a doctor/nurse comes here every thursday to check on the villagers.


the children's classroom. total of 2 classrooms make up their school.


carrots. weather has been too hot and dry so out of a lot of plots, only a few plots were growing crops.


french architecture







their bag quite cool hor


after chicken village, it was lunch time!


jars of herbal/snake wine


this is freaking gross lah. it's not only filled with snake, there's a freaking bird there on top complete with feathers.. urgh how to drink!



you gotta cut the chilli padi yourself with a spoon


loved this! it's like wanton but instead of the floury skin, they used cabbage! fantastic stuff.



fly infested rice


every good local coffeeshop must have the obligatory flies and doggy going round and round your tables scavenging for food


after another fantastic meal, it was time to sit down and write a testimonial for our new found friends.. it wasn't difficult to write good stuff about them. we even included our photos, haha.





9. incense making


frangipani/magnolia.. dunno


something about Buddha taking 7 steps once he was born

ok, i have never put any thought into how incense sticks were made. huh, not factory made meh? now we know that a little lady in a temple in dalat makes each incense stick by hand, taking a pink-painted bamboo stick, and rolling some cinnamon powder together with that sticky paste to make each incense stick.

and i finally got to wear the vietnamese cone hat! yay... free one summore no need to buy. just gope from their table hee..


have to test whether the cone hat is effective in the sun. it is really good, notice it provides his whole head and neck shade.


after shaping the sticks, they are laid out in the sun to be dried for hours.



this is the most wtf place we went to.. any idea?


it's actually a wood+anything you can make out of wood place.. 10. wood factory? the above picture shows a chair made out of wood.


this huge trunk can be made into a table top.


noticed that each city we enter has these signs, and as you leave the city they have the same sign with a red diagonal stroke across the picture signifying that you are leaving it!


ohh.. deja vu.. this is like the construction site we went into yesterday when we just reached da lat..


another mysterious site!


11. Mushroom farm


turned out that tintin was showing pb rows and rows of mushrooms! these are nylon bags of limestone and somehow the shrooms will sprout out.


dry the shrooms! Also a pretty fascinating place, how they can just dry the mushrooms along the road, no one steal meh?


this boy very smiley



we were on our way to the airport when we suddenly stopped.. hung asked us to cross the road to see 12. Waterfall


haha. this was pushing it a little.. some drain and they ask us to see.. ok, if there actually was water it might have been pretty magnificent but there was hardly a trickle.. =)



and we reached the airport at 2.


security guard eyeing their bikes


bye hung


bye tintin

so we said our byebyes to our 2 dalat friends who had taken really good care of us in just 1.5 days. we were taken around safely, to places we would never be able to explore to by ourselves, and to eat food we would never be able to order by ourselves. didn't even have to think about the itinerary, it was totally stress free. shiok. hopefully we will have a chance to come back to vietnam and take a longer easy rider tour.

oh, and before we left, hung asked us to take care in hcmc cos, people aren't as nice there in the city.. awww.

sooper cute baby at the airport who refused to smile at us. i tink he looks like tao2 da4 yu3.


someday i shld try using cartons as my luggage..


that's all the luggage there is?



our flight was at 4+ and it was only 2+ so we went to find some food



lemon juice and his stupid instant mee + veg




probably one of the few flights the airport serves



back in saigon!

dinner at Pho2000 where Bill Clinton dined when he visited Saigon. even though we know that the food can't be compared to the cheaper, dirtier and more authentic/local versions in the market, we still loved it. the hygienic outlook was a plus point, even the utensils were wrapped in plastic which i appreciated.

i tried the sapodilla/chiku/ren2 xin4 guo1 juice.. it's really good. walked around the night market near ben thanh.


greedy pb pretending to know how to choose durians


the durian wasn't very yummy and we didn't finish it

this super cute sweet little girl went around asking people to buy her flowers.. she is so pretty!

did a 'Manicure and Pedicure with french tip' in one of the salons, while pb did a massage. First they did the cuticle and heel scraping stuff.. oh their armchairs were also a massage chair so it was quite comfortable! After the cuticle stuff, I saw them take out a white polish and clear polish. huh? why no base color one? I tried to ask them and the pretty vietnamese girl strutted over and held my hand.. a little french tip ok? very nice.. Hmm. ok. fine.

i never seem to learn not to engage in such beauty routines in foreign lands where fashion is different AND i can't even communicate properly with them. not even after my hair ended up in tiger-like bleach stripes from my bangkok trip.

So that's not all. They started painting like, half of each of my fingers with the white polish instead of drawing a nice white tip. wth? i just bit my tongue and let them continue.. next they took a brush, dipped it in nail polish remover and erased away the unwanted parts, before ending with a clear coat of varnish. quite idea lah, just that this way you can't put any base coat beneath the french tips.

looks quite decent eh? very natural right.

After pb came out of his massage, he decided to join me and do the heel scraping thing too. they use the blade thing to cut away dead skin on your feet. I noticed that the lady was scraping his foot really hard, something like how you would de-skin a potato.. and next thing I knew, blood was oozing out. =( poor pb! And on hindsight we really shouldn't have done that cos i don't think they really sanitize their tools and we could have contracted some disease or something.. kinda scary.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

With our flight at 4pm, we had a morning to settle any odds and ends. Realized that we had not bought much stuff so we thought we'd go get some coffee powder and the cute vietnamese coffee filters from ben thanh market.

But of course, we had to stop by Pho2000 again for a very satisfying breakfast. Our last Pho Bo and spring rolls for the trip!

Ben Thanh market is just next door so we popped by




bought lots of overpriced coffee from this lady.


would you dare to drink this?


back at oscar saigon, we checked out and hung around waiting for time to go by


google vietnam!


hailed a cab. noticed that all the cab drivers have an iced coffee!


halong bay vs merlion


the hcmc airport is really new, clean and efficient, more so than changi airport i dare say

back in Singapore, after getting on the cab, I was in for a reverse culture shock. First the taxi driver on the right. Next, the empty and orderly roads with mostly cars instead of being covered with motorbikes.. and I realized how i had grown accustomed to the busy roads of Vietnam in just 4 days.

the fairy water puppet

Friday, April 11, 2008

ok this is almost out of point but, 2 days after, missing vietnamese food so much, we decided to go get some in Singapore. We went to Pho Hoa in Suntec. Ok I've actually tried this before going to vietnam and i found it to be really good. So nevermind that there were only like, 3 couples in the entire restaurant on a friday night, let's try it again.

The noodles weren't cooked enough, the soup wasn't flavourful. even the bloody coffee wasn't fragrant. I don't know if my expectations have gone up after visiting vietnam, but it was really disappointing. Think i'll visit the holland v branch, and other vietnamese restaurants to check out their food next.