More Da Lat

As I write, I'm playing catch up. Kim and I are on a minivan heading to Koh Chang, and though it has only been two nights since we left Da Lat, it seems a very long time past.

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While Da Lat does not boast the parks or white beaches that recommend other Vietnamese tourist towns, its citizens clearly hold great pride in their collective green thumb. The city maintains lovely street side gardens so that, as you stroll, you pass by beauties such as this datura.....

.....or oddities (for me) such as this wintering poinsettia which has grown to 3 metres across.

Each year, around Tet (February 7th this year), the city hosts the Da Lat Flower Festival and workers were in full prep mode during our visit......

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A specialty of the Da Lat area is a product called "weasel coffee". There is a local weasel - civet cat actually - that eats the coffee shrub fruit. The seed (what we call the coffee beans) passes through the gut of the cat and comes out whole in its scat. The scat is harvested and the beans removed, cleaned up a bit, roasted, and sold for four times the price of un-pooped beans. Here it is in its post pooped but pre-cleaned state.....

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Our last two full days in Da Lat were split between a short trip by train to a Da Lat suburb which boasts a large, Chinese influenced temple, and the Crazy House.

The small train which brought us to the temple dates from early in the century, it's coaches constructed of wood on metal running gear.....

The line it runs on once connected Da Lat to the major north/south line at Nha Trang (impressive given the 1500 metre elevation gain over the 180 km which separates the two towns) but was rendered unusable during the war as the tracks were regularly taken out by the VC. Ever since the war ended,  the government has promised a rebuild, but......

The temple boasts the glitz typical of the Chinese style - not really my cup of tea - but the shear size of the icons provide for an interesting visit. These three great visitors just inside the temple gates and are each about ten metres tall and carved from single pieces of wood. Larry....

.....Curly.....

.....and Moe.

The temple buildings are finished in mosaic of broken pottery set in mortar.....

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.....and house some impressive, twenty metre tall Buddhas, including this one in a more Khmer style.....

.....and this happy fella covered entirely in dried aster blossoms.....

.....and he looks out over the surrounding farms.....

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The next day we visited the Crazy House. Built by Dang Viet Nga, she claims that this bit of weirdness attempts to bring citizens closer to nature, though I kind of missed that. It is a collection of four or five buildings connected by dizzying, very narrow, aerial walkways featuring very low and completely inadequate railings, prompting this visitor to virtually crawl from one building to the next while twenty metres off the ground.

Early designs by Mrs. Nga were deemed too "western" by the state and either torn down or burned. Her father, however, eventually became the second head of the party after Ho Chi Mihn passed. Since then, her designs somehow seem less subversive.

A collection of photos from our visit.....

.....and that thing snaking across the roof is one of the walkways....

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.....and, what? A selfie? How innovating. 

.....and the views back over Da Lat.

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Our trip out of Vietnam featured a cab ride to the Da Lat airport, a flight to HCMC, and a flight to Bangkok. The only thing of note is that we shared the cab from our rooms with a couple from Salt Spring Island and, on our recommendation, they are going to come to Koh Chang mid February where we will reconnect with them.

In my last post is covered the trip from the airport to Pattaya, so next up, Pattaya.