Dalat

Thursday, March 28th, 2013 Dalat Vietnam

 This morning we had breakfast at our hotel. The woman who runs it is very attentive to the guests and very curt with the staff. However, it's a great breakfast with really good pho, spring rolls, omelettes and lots of other stuff. Pho (rice noodle soup) is like granola for breakfast here.
Our first destination was the Catholic church around the tip of the lake. Anita is planning to go to the Good Friday service and we had to check the times. It looks like 5:15 am or 5:15 pm. Hmmm, I wonder which one she'll choose.
Dalat is a former French colonial hill town, where French people working in Saigon came to escape the heat. They also administered coffee and tea plantations here. Thus, there is a Catholic church. It's not all that common but they are scattered all over Vietnam.

 It's a 7 km walk around the lake. All the way around there is a good walkway and a thin strip of parkland. This lake was created in the early 1900s by damming up a stream that runs through the valley.

About 2/3 of the way around the lake, we stopped at the Dalat Flower Garden. The entrance arch is made of hundreds of potted plants. This is a common technique here to create huge arches or floral signs.

It cost only 20,000 dong ($1) each to get in but that's double what it says in Lonely Planet. Again, the latest version of Lonely Planet is out of date. The garden, however, is beautiful. The weather today is a mix of sun and cloud and about 25C. It's the end of summer here so it's supposedly quite dry. The annual flower festival is at the beginning of January but the flowers looked awfully nice to us even this late in the dry season. There are large sculpted bushes, fountains and flowers growing all around. Anita is pouring tea (actually there's a water fountain behind).

We walked along a path and looked down on some of the gardens.

 There are a couple of huge greenhouses with lots more flowers inside.

 Sculpting bushes is very common here. That's great for the idiot tourist pose.

 Idiot tourist pose avec uneaten vegetable chien.

One greenhouse is full of roses, although they're a little past their prime.

 Great colours!

 Anita is posing with a pyramid of her favourite Vietnamese treasures.

That's right, it's a pyramid of all the bottles of wine she drank on this trip. Actually, Dalat wine is made here and it's really cheap at the convenience stores in town. The regular stuff is 60,000 dong ($3) and an upgraded bottle that Anita bought today cost her 76,000 dong ($3.80). Outrageous upcharge, we may go broke.

The Flower Garden was a nice place to spend a couple of hours this morning.

Finally, we walked back along the lake and up to our hotel. It looks like it may thunderstorm but in a couple of hours we'll go back up to the main part of town for dinner. Yesterday, we picked out a couple more restaurants that are close to each other so we'll walk up there later. We're going to miss the fantastic food in southeast Asia when we get home.