Deafening, Dangerous, Delightful, Death-Defying Dalat

Ok, so we had to get out of Saigon quick smart because it didn’t really suit our style. Big noisy Asian cities never do. We had heard about Dalat, which was supposed to be this nice little place out in the mountatinas, so we made a beeline for it pronto.

Unfortunately Dalat was not as quiet and as little as we had hoped. It actually attracts over 800,000 Vietnamese tourists every year and we were hoping it would be because of it’s nice quiet scenery but apparently Vietnamese tourists like kitsch attractions, because Dalat is full of pig-shaped balloons, rollercoasters down to waterfalls, and locals dressed as cowboys and bears.

The first night and most of the next day we spent valiently trying to find a room that wasn’t noisy (Shelley’s criteria) and had a view (Scott’s criteria). This isn’t easy with the constant beeping of motorcycles, taxis and buses everywhere. We finally found somewhere a bit out of town, which we could get to easily as we hired a motorcycle! Scott has become adept at negotiating the crazy traffic here, which never involves traffic lights, rarely involves giving way, and often involves people driving on the wrong side of the road or cutting across in front of you. But there is some sort of order to the chaos, and we haven’t hit anyone yet.

His best feat involved the two of us on the motorcycle with our two big bags and the one small bag (drving quite slowly I might add) to our new temporary home outside of the city. Next we thought it would only be fair to let Shell have control of our new toy. Ten minutes later we had our first motorbike accident. Well, not so much an accident as Shelley driving the bike into a ditch. It would be nice to say that it was a tricky turn, but it wasn’t. There also wasn’t any traffic to be seen anywhere, it was quite a wide road, and the bike wasn’t very difficult to drive.

Note to Jill and Chris that nobody was really hurt during our crash. Shelley got a few little scrapes and bruises (it was her pride that was hurt the most) and Scott being the big brave man that he is jumped off the motorcyle just before it hit the ditch so he got away pretty much scar free except for Shell calling him a big wussy wus bag for the next 2 days.

So our first 2 days in Dalat weren’t exactly success plus. But we had our motorcycle and our health and were going to find some nice places to explore God damn it. And we did! In fact we had a really great 3rd day of cruising around on the bike (this was the beautiful mountain scenery we were hoping for ) looking at a couple of random waterfalls, getting a cute duck paddle thing and having an explore around a man made but very pretty dam, playing pool and having a few beers with some other random travellers and finding the weirdest “waterfall” we had ever seen, which was more like a continuous mudslide.



The best part of the day was finding this amazing six tier pagoda, which we spotted randomly as we were cruising around. It was really beautifully coloured with pieces of ceramic plates and you could climb up through the inside to the top, which offered some amazing views of the local country side.

The most interesting part of the pagoda was this massive 3 metre tall, 2 metre diameter bell, with a big piece of log hanging next to it that you could use to ring the bell, so of course we did and we took a video of it, but the strangest thing is that you couldn’t hear the bell on the video. We tried three times and it made a really loud noise and you could hear the kids outside of the pagoda and other background noise on the camera but for some reason not the bell. Scott’s therory was that the bandwidth of the transducer of the camera was too narrow to capture the low frequency noise the bell made but Shell’s theory was that the bell was holy and therefore magical so its sound could not be captured (either that or we haven’t figured out how to use our new camera very well quite yet – nah it must be magical)


As if the success of our third day wasn’t enough, our 4th and final day in Dalat was so awesome!!! We went canyoning and it was great!! I’ll let the photos tell the main part of the story but basically we went for a 5 hour walk/climb down a river with 4 parts that we had to abseil. The highlight was abseiling down a 25 metre waterfall (not just a little trickly waterfall but a full on gushing, spraying, “what do you mean we’re going to absail down through that” waterfall). We also went down a natural waterslide and we were supposed to jump off a cliff into a rockpool at one stage but just before Scott was about to jump a 2 metre snake swam into the spot Scott was going to jump into so we decided to let the snake have that one.

Overall, Scott was stoked that Shell took an awesome photo of him doing a big jump off the abseil rope and into a rockpool and Shell was stoked that she did every single abseil even though she was scared out of her wits and that she was not a big wussy wus bag even once (unlike Scott who jumps off motorcycles just because of a little incy wincy ditch).

Swimming under a waterfall

Shell going down the 'Washing Machine'

Scott about to venture down the big waterfall

Scott's big jump at the end of the big waterfall