Da Lat

We were excited to leave Hoi An and get back to our normal traveling routine. Da Lat seemed like a good place to go, but we quickly discovered we could only get a room there for one night. We arrived just before two big Vietnamese holidays, Reunification Day (April 30th) and International Worker's Day (May 1st). That meant we could only stay about a day and a half, which was a little disappointing, but we still enjoyed our time there.

Our favorite new fruit we discovered on the trip is jackfruit, we we bought a great big slice and ate it for our lunch and dinner (it's a big fruit). We did end up getting a little sick of it by the end, but we knew that in less than a week we wouldn't be able to buy any more so it's good we got our fill.

The next day we did some real sightseeing. We went to the crazy house which is a series of Alice in Wonderland type structures and gardens. The woman who built it lives in the house which doubles as a hotel. It was fun to explore, stairs that went up, down, and all around. Leading you to the giraffe room, from roof to roof, or sometimes back where you started. It was a fun place to spend the morning.

Next we hiked over to the king's summer palace. Also an interesting place to visit, but not quite as grand as it sounds. Not at all like Buckingham Palace, or the palaces we visited in Thailand. This "palace" was very, very communist. It was communist in the sense that it was very simple. It served its function without an excess of adornments. Not built to impress, built to serve its purpose. To me the palace represented what communism should be, but wasn't. I would never expect to see a "palace" like this in Moscow and didn't expect to see one in Vietnam. But Vietnamese culture is very different, maybe its leaders were more serious about their own commitment to communism.

Sadly, that was it for Da Lat. We left that evening on a night bus for Saigon. Ugghh...another night bus. At least we could take comfort in the fact that we knew it would be the last night bus of the trip.