On Tour

A view of life on the road

We had a very brief stop in Dalat, sank a strawberry shake (possibly even eclipsing my love of mango shakes) and visited a mountaintop pagoda, and then scooted out of there on the back of a motorbike for a three day tour of the surrounds. It was so much fun!! I am pretty much anti-motorbikes but when traveling old ideals sometimes slip out of the window. We hired motorbikes and drivers through Freelance Cycles, strapped our backpacks onto the back of the motorbikes and away we went! It was exhilarating!! I can see why people get hooked on it: the wind in your face, being exposed to the elements, the freedom, and really being part of the landscape as you zoom through the mountains and alongside villages and rice paddies. It was incredible! An absolute Vietnamese highlight! Plus we rarely saw another traveller and so got off the tourist trail for a few days at least which was refreshing. It was chilled and fun and educational and a million other things too!! Brilliant!

We swung by this lovely blue water for a refreshing dip, after a slippy clamber down, plus a shoulder massage underneath the super powerful waterfalls.

Our first stop was Crazy House in Dalat in the style of Gaudi but executed with a little less panache. It was still an interesting spot with different animal themes running throughout, my faves being a huge ant where I drank a Vietnamese drip coffee, a big cheetah with scary red eyes, and a huge toucan with splayed wings. Crazy House is an ongoing process with new wings being continuously added to, we even had a clamber over the building site with bits of concrete and poles jutting out haphazard. Oh Health & Safety!

Crazy House under continuous construction

After exploring for an hour we hit the road with Khian and Khio our hilarious double-act drivers who entertained us with folk tales of cleverness and trickery, as well as logic puzzles using chopsticks and bamboo toothpicks that we very rarely managed to crack, and if we did it was with a fair few hints! Lots of fun!

On our first day we visited a flower farm. In Vietnam three pink roses shows love, yellow flowers for respect and red for luck. I received a lovely bouquet of pink and red flowers from my driver, none from Tom mind! We stopped off at a coffee plantation/rice wine factory combo. The rice wine is a super strong spirit made of rice (of course!) and locals make it for local consumption. It is pretty lethal stuff! Later we learnt that you can add animal bits and bobs with different effects: scorpions for the back, goats' penis as Viagra. Charming! At this little roadside place I had the best coffee of my life! Weasel coffee! To start you harvest the coffee beans, get little weasels to eat the coffee beans, wait for them to poop it out, collect the coffee beans (which are still intact!), and grind them up in the regular fashion...and this is weasel coffee!! We drank it in the usual Vietnamese drip coffee style and, oh my, it had the densest, smoothest, richest taste verging on alcoholic it was just so strong!

Waiting for our Vietnamese drip coffee sweetened with condensed milk. I'm a BIG fan!

As we approached the village where we were going to spend the first night a thunderstorm hit with dense rain so out came our matching green waterproofs which were a great lol. It was pretty scary and exciting driving through the rain and the storm with lightening cracking in all directions. We made it to our basic accommo of a huge wooden longhouse on stilts with mattress on the floor and mosquito net with no bathroom (the nearest was the restaurant down the road) and power cuts throughout the night just to add to the drama of the storm. We had a great feast with dishes galore. Khian had phoned ahead earlier in the day to make sure I had some veggie eats, and I sure did: tofu, battered mushrooms, wintermelon salad, greens, spring rolls, rice and more. Delish! We slept in our basic but huge wooden home with the loudest gecko shouting out "gecko gecko" right by our ears all night long.

In our matching waterproofs!

We also took in a brick factory, tea plantation, mushroom farm, silk worm factory, a poor attempt on my part at crossing a rickity bamboo bridge, paddled across a lake in a wooden canoe to see some surprising fishing tactics, cocoa plantation, rubber plantation, cashew nut farm, and saw a waterfall or two. Busy busy!

At the silk factory. You can see cacooned silk worms in the big baskets waiting to be cleaned. Don't fret, the dead silk worms are not wasted, they are fed to farm animals!

We had such a brilliant time and it was worth splurging the travelly budget. Khian and Khio defo made the trip memorable with their never-ending enthusiasm, puzzles, and skillful driving skills. Absolute highlight! I hugely recommend! Never try, never know!

Navigating our way through a herd of cows strolling along the road.