D A L A T

Da Lat is a small city tucked up in the mountains of the Vietnamesen highlands. It´s five hours busride from Saigon, and a great place to escape the traffic and humidity of the big cities. Dalat its a good 10 degrees cooler than Saigon and Nha Trang, and has a year around cool weather due to its altitude, around 1500m above the sea level.

The french used to use Da Lat as their vacation grounds and building European villas up in the hills, making Da Lat looks like kind of like Swiss mountain town with its colorful european architecture.

Adorable city

Da Lat

Because the climate in Da lat is so mild, they do a lot of farming of vegetables, fruits and flowers like mangoes, papayas, durian, strawberrys, avocadoes, coconuts... 

The town is surrounded by fruit and flower fields, not ricefields like the rest of the country. 

Local lady selling her strawberrys at the market

In the middle of Da lat you´ll find a sigthseeing favourit - the Crazy House. Its fairy-tale inspired architecture, made of a Vietnamese architect Dang Veit Nga. The house really do has crazy architecture and is definitly worth a visit. You can walk around all the house, see the rooms (you can actually stay here) and theres a great view over the city from the top of the house.

One of the days in Da Lat we went hiking on the mountain LangBiang. LangBiang is located 12 km outside Dalat Centre, and we rented motorcycle drivers to drive us there. This way we got to see Da Lat and the higlands Vietnamese style - riding on the back of a motorcycles.
Our motorcycledrivers were part of a tour-guide group who are called "the easy riders". They work by driving tourist around Vietnam on their bikes, it sounded so cool! And if we had more time, we would definitly do it! So if your going to Vietnam, check out "the easy riders".

On our way to LangBiang

On the way to the top

Local farmer 

From the top, 2167meters 

In addition to fruit and flower fields, Da Lat is surrounded by lakes, waterfalls and evergreen forest. Instead of just hiking to one of the many waterfalls, we wanted some adrenaline and decided to try Canyoning, which non of us never tried before. Canyoning involves a combintation of rock climbing and rappelling backwards down waterfalls, exciting!! We had so much fun!!

If I remember right, this is a 22m waterfall.

In the end of the waterfall we had to jump backwards 4-6meters and let go
of the rope. I´m pretty sure I screamed.

Me and Cecilie with our new canoying friends.