Before we start, here is the Google Photos album for this trip!

Next up are some tips for the trip:

• Taxi from airport costs 170,000 Dong (ca 6 EUR). Get this fixed price instead of going with grab or taxameter, as you in this case will have to pay twice as much! In general, I think Grab is more expensive than regular taxi in Vietnam, unless you get scammed.
• Do canyoning. You start out around 8 am and climb down canyons by a river. You do it in a group of around 8 people, and you eat picnic food together after the canyoning has finished. You are done around 14, and hopefully you have made some friends to hang out with later. Your shoes will get wet, and it costs 50 USD.
• Go to the maze bar. This is, as it sounds, a bar and at the same time a 3D maze. It took the creator 29 years to build it, and he died last year. Needless to say, this was his life work, and we were all amazed by this concept and architecture.
• Go to elephant waterfalls. If possible, rent a scooter to go here, as you will have more freedom to stop on the way and explore more of the area. I went here with a scooter and stopped by a coffee farm on the way here, while at the same time enjoying the landscape.
• Find a hostel run by a family. Most hostels here are run by a family, which results in them serving ‘family dinner’ as they call it. This dinner of theirs is delicious local food served at a very cheap price (35,000 Dong (ca 1 EUR) per meal at my hostel), and you can eat as much as you want.
• If you are not too fond of a very local experience, do not stay at Tigon Dalat Hostel. This hostel almost only has locals living in it, and they do not have proper rooms nor beds, which makes for quite bad sleep. The staff were nice to me, but I also got the feeling that they did not like me because I did not fit in - a quite unpleasant feeling. An example of this is when the hostel owner - a bit annoyed - told me that all scooters in Da Lat had been rented out, even though I obviously managed to rent one an hour later at a local scooter rental place. The local food they served was really delicious, though!
• If you are travelling in winter, you might want to bring some warm clothes here, as the temperature was between 10-20 degrees celsius when I was here in mid December.
• Go to Sense Coffee at night. They have a very good live band here, and quite good food!

Arriving in Da Lat, I was happy by the change of settings from Ho Chi Minh. This city felt completely opposite from Ho Chi Minh. It was a lot quieter and closer to nature, and the people felt much nicer. Taking the taxi was a joy, as we drove through the nice, mountaineous landscape for 45 minutes, followed by a nice lake and city with interesting architecture. It was, as Eric the New Zealander had described, a city and landscape with a Hayao Miyazaki vibe (the guy who made Spirited Away), and it felt as if this was going to be a very nice part of the trip.

Arriving at the hostel Eric had recommended - Tigon Dalat Hostel - I was greeted by a cheerful vietnamese guy who had been living in USA for a while. Then I met the owner who was a 29 year old vietnamese unmarried girl. The guy showed me to my bed, which was basically a mattress on the floor next to five others on the third floor of the house. I did not have a separate room and could hear the others in the hostel loud and clear. This place gave me a very local feeling, and as it turned out, I was the only westerner that was going to stay at this hostel during my stay here.

Soon after having settled down in my mattress, I got called down for family dinner, where the staff had served a delicious dinner filled with local food consisting of duck, mushroom soup, rice and other things a do not remember in this moment. I could take as much as I wanted to, and as soon as I asked about payment they told me that “we will take care of that later”. It was a delicious meal, and conversing through it, I found out that the vietnamese war was a very sensitive issue for the vietnamese, as there are many pro americans in Vietnam. I had thought about it before - that even though USA seemed to have done horrible things in Vietnam, their relations seemed very good - and now it felt like I got further insights to the part of their history that had been censored away. My take after this conversation is that while USA did many horrible things in Vietnam, the communist forces also did horrible things, but censored them away.

We finished the meal and soon thereafter I got coffee Vietnamese style while the owner brought forward a deck of cards to show me her repertoir of card tricks. She was impressive, and she really managed to entertain me with this for more than half an hour. Talking with her, I also realized how big women’s role in this society was. Apparently she had cooked the whole meal and was the owner of this hostel. She told me that in her family home, her mom had done every chore, whereas her dad only worked and then came home and relaxed. As I later found out, this was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the women’s role in the vietnamese society!

After she was done with her tricks, I decided to go out and have a look around in the city, which made me end up in their street market close to the lake. It was a bit cold here in the night, and stupidly enough, I had no idea about this when I planned for the trip. As a result, I strolled around in shorts and a t-shirt while everyone around me wore winter clothes. They looked at me as the stupid tourist who had not planned for the trip before going. I looked at them as weird locals who could not handle colder temperatures or, as I liked to call it, swedish summer.

Nevertheless, I had to buy some warmer clothes, as I had heard that it was even colder in my next destination, Hanoi. Therefore, I strolled around and looked at sweaters and pants, everytime pointed at with laughter by the shopkeeper’s winter-clothed friends as the perfect selling object. I ended up buying a red sweater for 100,000 Dong (ca 4 EUR) which I wore throughout the rest of my trip, which was about one week. I did not have much space left in my bag, so this was the solution I had to go for…

After the night market, I went straight back to the hostel and went to bed to get a good night’s sleep for the next day’s canyoning trip. As I started lying down in my bed, I got a feel for just how much of a local place this was. I could hear the locals singing and talking loudly in other beds and ‘rooms’ (they were not really rooms, as there was just a thin wall or a curtain separating them from my room). Luckily, I had brought both earplugs and a sleep mask for a good night’s sleep, so my night still got saved.

Or so I thought at first. At 4 am I woke up by the locals screaming and singing cheerfully on the floor below mine. Wondering what the hell I had bought myself into, I tried to put my earplugs back in, get some more sleep and hope that they would quit this unholy act soon. They did not, and I kept on lying half asleep in my bed until I finally gave up around 7 am to ask for some breakfast from the hostel.

I got sent to the owner’s mom’s hostel which was on the other side of the street. Here I once again got amazed by their food as she served me some delicious kind of soup, bread, some kind of omelette, green tea and some sort of banana pancakes. I ate my breakfast alone, which I believe made the mom ask one of her staff - Hamm I believe his name was (I am very bad at names, so I do not know if I remember correctly) - to keep me company. We talked for a while, until I went back to my hostel to brush my teeth and get picked up for the canyoning trip by Viet Challenge Tours.

At the canyoning trip, I met a German couple, a Finnish guy, some brittish guys and a couple of dutch couples. This trip was a quite nice way to make some friends in the city, and it was definitely a highlight for me, as canyoning turned out to be both fun - climbing down mountaineous areas with rope by a river was a quite different kind of activity to do during travelling - and socially rewarding, as I finally got to hang around some other travellers who could speak decent English.

Later that day, I also joined the Finnish guy and the German couple for dinner at their hostel, which was more of a backpacker’s hostel (unfortunately I cannot remember the name of their hostel, and google maps does not help in giving out the hostel’s name). Eating dinner here cost me 70,000 Dong (ca 2.5 EUR), and then I bought a Saigon beer for 15,000 Dong (ca 0.5 EUR) to go along with the dinner. It was a good dinner, but not the same quality as my hostel, and I noticed quite quickly that I was noticeably lonely here. Everyone seemed to be travelling as a couple or with friends, and I was travelling alone and bought my way into this dinner in order to have some company for the night. The Finnish guy turned out to be travelling with his girlfriend, so my role during this dinner changed immediately once I sat down. On my right hand there was now the German couple, the Finnish couple and me - setting me up perfectly as the third wheel. On my left side there were some Australian guys who had been travelling together in Vietnam for the past few weeks, talking about their parties, togetherness and not-being-alone-or-a-third-wheel-ness. It was a marvellous experience, and what made it even greater was that I tried to switch my attention to these groups whilst trying to overhear the loudness of the room. Naturally, I ended up not hearing that much and slowly turned into a first wheel of my fleet. This made it very nice when people began singing karaoke; shifting attention from the social dynamics to that awkward voice’s lack of dynamics.

Needless to say, I left that dinner feeling quite lonely and took a half hour walk before I ended up at maze bar, where a dutch couple from the canyoning had promised to show up at 21. I saw them by the entrance, and we walked through the maze for half an hour. It was very impressive seeing this bar, as it reminded me a lot about trollskog (I believe there is not an english word for it) and the tales around it, and as it was a maze, there were many passages to explore, and I naturally felt a bit lost every now and then. Right before I left the bar, I met the dutch couple again (they were very nice people, by the way), and they told me that the creator of this bar had worked on it for 29 years before he passed away last year. In other words, this was his life’s work, and in my words, you should definitely pay this bar a visit if you are ever in Da Lat!

Anyways, tired of hanging out with myself and this couple (and briefly stumbling upon some of the people from the hostel in which I had eaten dinner), I went back home to have another night filled with local experiences and tortures. Before that, however, I had some delicious ice tea at Uncle Tea, that I can recommend to you!

Next day, I planned on renting a scooter to have a look around Da Lat. Firstly, though, I had my regular breakfast and this time, happily surprised, I ate it in company with a nice 40-something-year-old czech couple. We ended up talking for an hour, I believe, and they gave me travel advice on things to see in Da Lat and talked about how they wanted to avoid Christmas back home, like so many others I had met on this trip. All of a sudden this part of the trip felt less lonely, and they ended up giving me a map with marks on things to see outside of Da Lat.

Having talked with them, I went back to my hostel to brush my teeth and ask if they could help me rent a scooter for the day. It turned out to be impossible, as all the scooters from the scooter rental place they fixed it from had already been rented out. Sad about the sudden crash of my plan, I went for the second best alternative and followed Hamm (the local guy in the mom’s hostel across the street that I had talked to the day before) to the bus stop. The bus, however, took too much time to arrive, and after a long wait, Hamm decided to call his friend to see if there were any scooters for me to rent. Luckily, there was a scooter which I managed to rent for 100,000 Dong (ca 4 EUR) for a day + ca 90,000 Dong (ca 3 EUR) for the fuel costs.

I now had a scooter, a map and a phone with internet access, and set out to explore the surrounding area. I had heard about brown clothed cops pulling foreigners over and taking all their cash for not having an international driver’s license, which made me drive slowly and store a 500,000 Dong bill in my sock in case something were to happen. This also made the whole ride much scarier than it needed to be.

Anyways, my first stop on this scooter ride was Linh Phuoc Pagoda. As it turned out to be a bit hard to find the Pagoda, I ended up first visiting the Dien tho Phat Mau Da Phuoc, and then taking a 5 minute walk to the Pagoda. The Dien tho Phat Mau Da Phuoc was a very nice sight, though, and as it was located on a hill, I had a good sight of the surrounding landscape.

Visiting the Pagoda, I was first quite impressed by this temple’s different nature compared to the previous temples I had seen. This temple had multiple floors and a big buddha, as can be seen below, and I was a little bit impressed by it all. I was even impressed when I went below to see a room devoted to wooden art, as well as a green lit room with a sacred forest vibe, decorated with emerald buddhas and wax figures of meditating monks.

Then all of a sudden I walked down another floor and met this:

It was a temple floor turned into a haunted house, and I ended up walking here for 5 minutes, trying to find my way out and scared… of someone stealing my bike while I was looking at this temple. It was quite nice visiting this temple and all, but what the hell was that all about?

I now took my bike to a street café, Panorama Café Dalat, that I had seen on the way here and grabbed a coffee for 40,000 Dong (ca 1.5 EUR) to get a great view of a valley.

Then I continued my bike ride to the buddhist temple Thien Vien Truc Lam Da Lat by the Ho Tuyen Lam lake. This temple was beautiful with a mix of great architecture and vegetation, and I highly recommend you visiting it! Hopefully these pictures will tell you why:

Next up, I drove around the lake for a bit, until my tank got too empty and I decided to go back to the city to fill it up. The houses around the lake told me a story of how there are quite a few relatively rich people here in Vietnam, as these houses had their closest comparisons in forts.

Having tanked almost a full tank, my next goal was to get to the Elephant waterfalls, that I had gotten recommended to visit both through online sources and through friends and fellow travellers having gone here. As it would turn out, the trip here was the highlight of the day, and my highest recommendation of the scooter trips you can do here.

Before you set out, though, you should know that these waterfalls are very far away, and it took me about two hours of driving through the local vietnamese landscape - a very beautiful sight - before I got here. On the way, I saw a big standing Buddha statue, some road cows, a coffee farm and a flower park.

When I got to the Elephant waterfalls, I had to pay 10,000 Dong + 20,000 Dong for parking and tickets (ca 0.3 EUR and 0.7 EUR respectively) and I could only visit the waterfalls for 15 minutes before the park closed at 17. Stressed about the impending sundown, I took these pictures before I went back to the coffee farm and flower park:

When I got back to the flower park, I had to pay a 15,000 Dong (ca 0.5 EUR) entrance fee in order to go inside, which in my words was not really worth it. Although, I did meet an asian family inside who wanted me to take pictures of them. Apparently they had been on this same spot 15 years before, and Vietnam had changed a lot since then. Also, the dad, not knowing any English, knew fully well how to photobomb my pictures with a big smile! The flower park was quite nice, though (even though very small and not really worth the money).

Having spent about 5 minutes here, I walked across the road to the coffee farm, which was a high end farm where they use weasels to pick out the highest quality coffee beans which they then collect to create one of the most exclusive kinds of coffee in the world. I ended up buying a 100 g bag for 400,000 Dong (ca 15 EUR) as a Christmas gift for my parents. In a hurry, I also managed to get some really nice pictures of the sunset at this place before I had to leave to get back home. It was a pity that I could not enjoy some coffee by this sunset and view, but I really did not want to drive in the dark with a half decent scooter in Vietnam’s horrible traffic.

Turns out I had to drive in the dark for quite some time anyways, and it got very cold as I was only wearing shorts and the sweater that I had bought the day before. I eventually got back to the hostel, though, and over here I got served some sort of Vietnamese Tacos, which in my opinion was one of the best - if not the best - foods I had in Vietnam. I took some lettuce leaves, cucumber slices, some sort of white sweet potatoe, some sort of fried corn roll, some pork slices and a home made spicy sauce and wrapped it up in vietnamese rice paper. It was delicious!

After dinner, I once again went to the night market, but this time to buy some Christmas gifts for my family. They have a lot of foods to try out here in Vietnam, and so I thought that it would be a great gift to let them try out some of the flavours they had to offer. As I write this now, they have already managed to try out most of the foods, and they have mixed feelings about it. Apparently, I bought them tamarind candy, which turned out to be a very spicy kind of date (svenska: dadel) that they did not like. I also bought them dried papaya fruit, though, which they have almost finished now!

After the market, I walked to Sense coffee, which Maximilian the German ETH exchange friend had recommended me to go to. Over here, they had a very good live band, and even though many kept on staring at me as the lone westerner, I ended up liking the café a lot. Thus, this café also ends up on my recommended list, so thank you Max!

Lastly, walked back to the hostel, where I now had to sleep in a different bed because a lot of local vietnamese people were going to stay here this night. I think I do not need to tell you how the night turned out…

The staff were quite kind to me though, and I got a take-away breakfast for the airport whilst they apologized for not having more foreigners staying at the hostel. It was also very cheap to live here, as 3 nights cost me 20 USD plus 35,000 Dong (ca 1 EUR) per dinner I ate. To sum up this part of the trip, it was quite lonesome, but very cheap and I ended up seeing and doing quite many nice things in a short amount of time.

Next up, Hanoi!