Dalat - Saturday and Sunday

We've spent the past few days in Dalat, a town at 4600 feet in the central highlands. We took a bus here from Nha Trang. It was a 4 hour ride over a major mountain pass, unfortunately at the top of the pass it was a very foggy and we couldn't see anything.

Dalat is a beautiful, hilly city filled with French architecture, flowers, great food and wonderful people. It is known as the honeymoon capital of Vietnam and is a popular destination for Vietnamese on their honeymoons. There are bakeries and coffee shops everywhere, along with the usual great Vietnamese food. Have we mentioned the baguettes we eat for breakfast everyday? We can get 8 of them for $1.

We spent yesterday seeing the city sights and today we hired a car and driver to take us on a trip around the countryside. We visited two different buddhist pagoda's complete with giant buddha statues. We went to a waterfall where the main attraction was a luge rollarcoaster ride down a steep hill to the waterfall viewing area. The kids loved it and rode it twice. We also made them hike down the hill to the waterfall. We visited a coffee plantation and a silk making factory where they do the complete process from the silk worms to weaving the silk into cloth and dyeing it.

The market in Dalat is great. All kinds of interesting stuff from dried fruits of all kinds, beautiful vegetables, fish,meat, tons of clothes, etc. The night markets are the best. They block off the streets to traffic on Sat and Sunday evenings and everyone from little children to teens and adults are hanging out in the streets shopping, eating street food, and visiting. We've had fun buying both souvenir type things and also everyday stuff. Tonight all the kids picked out hats (warm ski type hats), socks (at 25 cents a pair we decided to stock up), and custom made beaded bracelets.

We have not met any Americans traveling in Vietnam at all. We've met a couple of Austrialian families with children, but our group with 4 kids definitely makes us stand out. People love the kids especially Aaron and Eva and want to kiss them and take pictures with them. Today Aaron was swarmed by a group of Vietnamese Buddhist nuns on holiday from Saigon.

Tomorrow we will hang around Dalat, catch up on journals, homework. drink coffee and see some more sights and then fly back to Hanoi in the evening. We decided to change our plane tickets to fly from Dalat so we didn't have to travel back to Nha Trang. Vietnam Airlines is much more pleasant than Alaska Airlines - the fee to change all for of our tickets both date and departure city was $35. The 650 mile trip costs about $250 for all of us.

The trip is going by too fast and we are very sad that it is going to end. We will come home with lots of stories.