We got the train from Dieu Tri and then a bus to Dalat with the Sinh Tourist. But Dalat itself didn’t win us over – maybe we’d set our expectations too high.
We were up at 5.45am again to be driven from Bai Xep back to the train station in Dieu Tri after our one night’s stop in the ‘shark shack’. Kim got hustled a bit by a Vietnamese granny who was very keen on taking him off to go and buy some food somewhere. Even though we were hungry we decided it was best to just stay put and wait for our train 30 minutes later at 7am (yes, we were at the train station early again).
The train ride was made slightly uncomfortable by the fact someone had thought it a good idea to put a cat in a cage and lock it in a cupboard under the sink right next to our seats. So the poor thing meowed us all the way to Nha Trang. Other than that it was a pretty empty train so we could observe the views from both sides of the train. The countryside was starting to get some nice mountainous peaks in the distance.
We arrived into Nha Trang after a 4-hour ride and then walked to the Sinh Tourist bus station about half an hour away, stopping for lunch along the way. We’d ordered bus tickets online, leaving Nha Trang at 1pm and arriving in Dalat at 5pm. It said on our ticket to arrive 30 minutes before departure so that’s what we did. Cue lots of paperwork exchange and 30 minutes of waiting and we were ready to leave. Even though you already show up with a ticket, Vietnamese bus companies like to exchange it for another one, and then 30 minutes later, exchange it for another one. It keeps the people working in the office busy.
The bus we got from Nha Trang to Dalat was to take 4 hours, and we had a toilet stop after about 1.5 hours which was mainly for the driver to eat something and for the tourists to be encouraged to buy something. We quickly discovered that no bus company seems to give you any info about the journey, but if there’s no toilet on the bus, they will stop every so often for breaks at a place where you can also buy food – either to eat in or take away. It’s not predictable when so you need to drink the free water they give you wisely. After our stop we carried on crawling our way up through the mountains to Dalat. The scenery was glorious. We got extremely excited about our stay in this mountain-top town.
And then we arrived in Dalat. And we fell back down to earth with a bump. We arrived hating it, and left strongly disliking it, so there was some show of improvement at least. So to be fair to Dalat, let’s try and work out why we didn’t seem to agree with all the other bloggers and travel writers about this ‘charming town’:
- As soon as we were dropped at the Sinh Tourist office in Dalat we were hassled by touts trying to sell us tours. It was a good 10 minutes of walking before we had gotten rid of them.
- We arrived on Christmas Eve, and hadn’t really booked anywhere to stay upfront, so we ended up in a cheap and horrible guesthouse. That’s definitely our fault, not Dalat’s.
- There are scooters everywhere – to me it felt worse than Hanoi. There’s a sort of pretty lake in the middle but when it’s being circled by beeping and buzzing non-stop it kind of takes the charm out of it.
- We had been so blown away by the scenery approaching Dalat that I don’t think it stood a chance. We spotted waterfalls aplenty and so when we were considering doing a day trip from Dalat to some of their famous waterfalls nearby (which have been turned into theme parks by the sounds of it), we decided they probably weren’t going to be as nice as the ones we’d already seen.
(Side note: when we got to our next destination – Cat Tien – we met a couple of Americans who also really didn’t like Dalat. There was a huge sigh of relief all round when we realised we weren’t alone…)
So, we had Christmas Eve dinner in a BBQ place which was very popular with the locals, then on Christmas Day we basically spent all morning trying to get ourselves booked on a bus out of there the next day. We had a nice enough lunch at the Dalat Train Cafe which allowed us to wander around the French quarter (nothing special at all) then had our first experience of a Vietnamese supermarket. In the evening we went to Goc Ha Thanh which was good and we wished we’d found that street the night before because there seemed to be a nicer feel to that area.
So we left Dalat the next morning feeling super happy we were on a bus out of there. Maybe we’d set our expectations too high, but we really couldn’t see what it had going for it. We took one photo while we were there.