Dalat

5am in the morning and we were herded off the bus to find an awakening Dalat city, put our bikes back together and quickly found the market already in full swing. There were loads of fresh fruit and vege as well as a rather stomach churning meat section, a big central building full of any possible item you could want and lots more action happening around the sides - needless to say we spent quite a bit of time here over the next few days! Got some market food, drank a few coffees and waited until a reasonable hour to find a hotel... no rest for the sleep deprived so just kept on going!

The task at hand was getting that all elusive visa extension we had tried so hard to get in the north, thankfully we found a place in Dalat that got it done for us in a day, so with that taken care of we had a look around. Funny city Dalat, almost felt European with its mountain location, pine trees and lakes, even had a tacky Eiffel tower model. Back to the market where we were total vegan heaven with the 'An Chay' vegetarian food stall! Stuffed ourselves silly with delicious tucker.

Back to our room to rest and continue drying out all our wet damp things, then off to check out the night life... Bumped into some other travellers and ended up having yet another all nighter involving a few drinks (love that malibu and coke!), lots of games of pool, guitar sing alongs, early morning market raiding, lake side shenanigans, cheesy waterfalls and a giant chicken hunt...

OK, I'll expand on the last one for ya's. Two of our comrades were a couple of top blokes from Oz, travelling Vietnam by motorbike (but we didn't hold either of these things against them). The next day, having still not slept, they invited us out to go find what is commonly called 'the chicken village'. So called because of its giant poultry statue its a small minority village with some nice handicrafts and so on. With a picture of a chicken and the illusion that with such a novel land mark such a place would be easy to find we set off on our mission. We went up and down and round about, down small tracks and up through the back streets, eventually we knew we were close when the 2 parties managed to loose sight of each other and we spent the next few hours trying to re-unite! Bit of a disaster all in all but we all got to see the chicken in the end and the people were lovely and welcoming.

Back to catch a quick 40 winks and get ready to head out again - gotta live it up whilst we can! Met many of the usual suspects from the previous night and ended up back at the same bar, another fun crazy night but we all finally did leave and get some proper shut eye.

Woke up still understandably sluggish but had to check out so quickly packed and before setting off visited our beloved market for one last vege fill and grocery shopping. On the way out of town we stopped by the 'crazy house' a unique architetrural structure of spirals and staircases, peep holes and passages that houses guestrooms of different themes - it was definitely different!

So it was time to say farewell to Dalat, a jolly good few days - seemed like we had been there forever but maybe thats cos we were awake the whole time!? 50km down the road got us to a smaller sized town and a place to crash early for the night. Its a hard life sometimes!