Dan and Ells' Travels: Easy Rider

Fri 22 June

Today we were on a bus again, but this time only for 4 hours, heading inland and up into the highlands to Dalat. I had the batty little pop out seat that was up the front in the middle – without a seat belt so was pretty glad we didn’t have an accident or I would have been in trouble. It was a really nice drive, very green and mountainous, apart from the crazy driving that they do here, going around blind corners and buses would just be overtaking each other, all they do is toot, its nuts, there is absolutely no surprise as to how many people die on the roads here.

just casually driving in the middle of the road

the road signs look like gravestones

Dalat town

Dalat is a daricious temperature – more what we are used to back home, it was nice steeping out the hotel and not being slapped in the face with heat. We headed into town to check out the central market, on the way we got chatted to by these 2 chaps who were “Easy Riders” – bikers who take you on tours, so we booked in to do a tour with them the next day.

Central Market
- at night the stairs had heaps of mini food stalls

Heaps of dried flower arrangements around the joint

Portable fish tank

The market was super busy lots of produce, and in some parts the nasty nasty smell of meat sitting in heat uuurgh.

Sat 23 June

Woke up this morning with a bit of woozey tummy, 3 pills later I was crossing my fingers that it was finished for the day, if you get my drift (aka had the shits).

possible cause of tummy issues

Our easy riders picked us up at 8.30am. Our first stop was at Pagoda Loi Cao Bach, and we smiled at the happy budda, it was really cool with lots of statues around in the garden area.

The second stop involved us being dropped at the bottom of a hill, then walking up it whilst the guys drove to the other side to meet us. It was a beautiful day so we had a great view over Dalat, as a city it is well known for its bountiful fruit and veges, as it had the best climate for them.

it was a steep climb!

The third stop was at a green house for flowers, we did not find this very interesting so it was a pretty quick stop. Then we headed to “little Ha Noi” a town about 30mins away from the main city. On the way as we wound through the hills, we saw a family of 4 that had gotten off their motorbike and the dad was holding the kid to take a pee on the road, hilarious the places they pee.

We stopped at a coffee plantation and tried an unripened bean, bluegh.

So here is some interesting things we learnt at our next couple of stops, about silk! No shit it was really interesting. So farmers have the silk worms, they feed them up on Mulberry leaves for 5 days, and then they put them on wooded racks, where they weave themselves into cacoons. The farmer sells them to the processing factory where they cacoons are put into warm water to soften them up (yes whilst the buggy is still in their alive, but not for long) then put them into a large trough where they remove the bad silk string from the outer of the cacoon then get the single threads and attach them to a bobbin which winds the silk off the cacoon. Amazing.

silk worms pre cacoon

silkworm cacoon

getting the silk strands

Then my driver Son gets us to try the dried out worms, omg it was na – asty! He loved them, kept going on about the protein, this was still not enough to convince me to finish mine.

dried silk worms...

not so delicious

Elephant waterfall was our next stop – called this because the rocks covered with grass look like the back of elephants, it was a cool little treck though rocks with carved steps to get to the viewing of the waterfall.

a delightful example of a loo for you, I had to go here

“Mushroom Village” yay more learning here, I will not bore you with the process precisely but they pretty much have mushrooms hanging in shelters, then they dry them out (they last 1 year) and sell them for cooking.

Had such a good lunch at a local restaurant – they had their dog trotting around and his bed was under the counter – this is common also including stray kitties. We were stuffed and it only costed around NZ$1.50 each. See the deliciousness below.

We also stopped at a "minority village".

big cock

The second waterfall we went to had a “slider” thing that you could ride down to the waterfall, and back up, we did it twice it was really fun, the second time we went on the same contraption together because ell wanted to go super fast, and we did! I lost my sunglasses but the helpful contraption assistant managed to get back up the track and find them for me, excellent.