Back to the hills in Dalat

The second of our visits to Vietnams French Hill stations. This time in Dalat. It was cool to see the differences between a northern and southern Vietnamese hill station. Here there were less tribal villages and more of a farming scene, where the locals grow exotic flowers, produce silk and grow coffee to aid the countries income from overseas trade.
We decided to book a tour to see all that Dalat had to offer, and it turned out to be a very tiring day. The tour started by visiting the flower gardens out in the country, where there main product was the rose. It was interesting to see how the flowers are snipped, their heads carefully wrapped then bundled together in order to be sent across the world to destinations such as the U.K, Holland, France and the Czech Republic. It was also funny watching Maj and Elliot being little gays, taking the most close-up shots of these flowers ever, I think they were competing.




Our second stop was at the coffee plantations. Here we tasted freshly picked coffee beans, which look nothing like what you'd think before they're roasted. It was here where I ran through the biggest cobweb ever and had the biggest yellow spider attached to me. I'm not that fearfull of spiders but that mo'fo' was terrifying, I just thought it was poisonous. The guide told me it wasn't. Then Gee, threw a coffee bean at my head and I nearly had a heart attack, thanks for the support ya prick. We went to a local cafe and tried the coffee, it was mighty strong, but tasted real good. My likeness of coffee has definatly improved since traveling. We found out that after the United States and Brazil, Vietnam is the 3rd largest exporter of coffee.
Stop number three took us to a silk producing factory. Here they had a collection of silk worms who make their cocoons out of a delicate material which is transferred into silk through a long process. Each cocoon gave off around 1 km of silk. Another fact for you.



Stop four was to the local rice wine factory, where they brewed and distilled they're own alcohol. We got to have a taste of the final product and it was ghastly. A real nose burner. For some reason there were pigs dotted around the factory, must be a special ingredient. I became more interested in taking pictures of the piggies.

Stop five was a quick visit to a cricket farm where we ate some battered crickets. We also sacrificed a cricket to a spider and watched him take the effort to spin up his prey, then the tour guide took the cricket down and freed him. The spider was well pissed.

The next stop was to visit a waterfall and a surrounding Buddhist temple, with another big Buddha statue. Standard ting nowadays.

Our final stop was to see some crazy 'Alice in Wonderland' style hotel/house. It was really strange, but great to explore. Made a nice end to a great day.

Dalat Photo Link:

http://www3.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4299721011/a=2264773011_2264773011/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/