The Highlands (Vietnam has them too!)

Our next stop was a town called Dalat, a town high in the mountains, with a climate all of its own. It felt more like parts of Europe than like Asia, with colourful colonial-style buldings and densely forested mountains shrouded in mist. On our way there, we saw an unseasonable tropical storm, complete with lashing rain and thunder. It was the first time we had seen rain in over two months. We met a lovely German girl called Lena on the bus - she spoke perfect English and was travelling solo through most of Vietnam.

In Dalat we all ended up staying at the same guesthouse then having dinner together in the cafe below, which could have been the set of a movie about interrailing across Europe - it was smoke-filled and at any one time had representatives from most countries in Western Europe drinking beer or the excellent Vietnamese filter coffee. We arranged to do a trek the following day, along with Lena and two Canadian women who spoke mostly French.

The trek was around 16km in total, through forested countryside and jungle scrub. We passed several coffee plantations and also saw mangoes, lemongrass, potatoes, ginger, bananas and chillis growing. Along the way we had to walk across three suspension bridges over rivers, which grew progressively more decrepit as the trek went on, until the final one had gaps we had to leap across and  a railing detached from the bridge itself.
Parts of the trek were so steep that they were almost vertical, but the lunch of baguettes and fresh fruit on a mountaintop was worth it. The next day however, I had pains in places where I hadn't known muscles even existed. (Hips?) We climbed up and down three peaks, the highest of which was 1700m, and ended up at a pretty waterfall called Tiger Falls. The rickety bridge is just visible above the waterfall in the photo below.

We met Lena later that night for dinner - I had sauteed chicken with lemongrass and chilli and Dave had minced beef wrapped in something we think was a banana leaf. Afterwards we all returned to our hotel cafe for strawberry wine. (Dalat is where most wine and coffee made in Vietnam comes from.) The next day we all went our separate ways, and Dave and I ended up spending a rainy couple of days at the beach resort of Nha  Trang.