Just spent the past few days ditching the 4 wheeled transportation and exploring the central highland countryside (Dalat) by motorbike. To those of you who know us well, this wasn’t the typical moto-rally adventure that we occasionally partake in. No, we actually hired some professionals this time around to drive while we lazed about on the back seats. Ana had heard about these “easyriders” from another traveler in Saigon, and the trip was supposed to be a blast. We decided to sign up with a couple of local guys as we were still a bit nervous about driving around in Vietnam traffic. Besides, at $20 bucks the full day tour was pretty cheap.
The riding itself was entertaining as Vietnam’s crazy traffic feels even more hectic when you are scooting around in the middle of it. We stopped at a few locations that weren’t super memorable: some Pagodas, a rice wine factory, some flower farms… but did see a couple of places that are worth mentioning. First was a silk factory, where silkworm cocoons are spun in to silk thread and woven into fabric. I had never seen one of these before, and it was pretty amazing watching the whole process in action. The silk gets de-spun from individual cocoons (with the larvae still in it!) before getting spun back into spindles: one individual strand at a time. No wonder silk is so expensive. I can only imagine how painstaking the process must have been before the invention of industrial machinery. Second up, we saw a very Gaudi-like building in town appropriately named “Crazy House”. This place was designed by an architect who happened to be the Vietnamese Communist Party leader’s daughter… so you can only imagine what people thought when she was allowed to build such an unusual set of buildings. Everything seems like you are walking in a treehouse… with small bridges connecting rooms at different levels. At points I fancied myself a hobbit: walking amongst oversized mushrooms while opening circular doors.
Our two motorcycle guides made a big sale of it: trying to convince us that we should ditch the busses and motorcycle with them all the way to Hoi An. This sounded romantic at first, but upon further reflection was a bit impractical. If it rained on us, we would be miserable. And the trip would take us around 6 days of riding. We had a fair amount of time in Vietnam, but not so much that we could burn through around 4 extra days. We thanked them for their tour and proceeded to book a bus to Nha Trang which was on the way to Hoi An. Not 5 minutes after we left, we saw a horrible, horrible accident down the road involving about 3 motor-scooters. One of the bikes was so badly hit that the front wheel completely tore off, shattering the front forks. In the carnage, a guy laid motionless on the road… his friend trying to pick him up like a lead weighted rag doll. Such a gut wrenching thing to behold: but none-the-less affirming to us that ditching the bikes was a good decision.
Click Here to see a map of Dalat (and Nha Trang)…
Here are our photos of our stay:
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/Dalat
http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/NhaTrang
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