A Change of Scenery

Blogger finally came back online today, so now I can do up another post. Where do I begin? How about with my first day in Dalat. I arrived there mid afternoon to rainy skies. It was a different type of scenery, one of many kinds I have seen in Vietnam. This country is turning out to be a lot more geographically diverse than I imagined it would be. I've gone from arid farmland near Pleiku to jungle in Nha Trang, then to desert in Mui Ne, and now to pine covered mountains around Dalat.

On first glance Dalat seemed like a nice city that would be fun to hang around in, but once a girl I met on the bus and I went out to search for a restaurant, it became more of a chore than anything. It literally took us an hour to find a place to sit down for a meal, then another hour to find and walk back to our hotel, all courtesy of Dalat's extremely messed up road system. The next day was the same sort of deal, but this time it was half an hour to find an internet cafe. By that point my mind was made up to leave the following morning.



All Dalat wasn't bad though. I did find some silver lining in the cloud, before they poured rain on the Dalat countryside. I took a cable car to the other end of the valley, where I found a nicely manicured Buddhist Temple, and a lake below it. It was a nice place to take an afternoon stroll. The rain that fell just before I arrived filled the forest with a nice smell of pine. It reminded me of hiking in the Rockies back home, and instantly made me homesick. It's amazing how one smell or sight can trigger memories and feelings like that. It made me fell like the time is coming for a little change of scenery. I do miss being among pine-covered mountains, and I'm hoping China can provide that change for me.

And now I'm back in Nha Trang. I arrived yesterday at noon and immediately headed for the beach to meet up with some friends from Thailand. The sunny weather has run out though, and today I'm bored out of my skull; rain doesn't do Nha Trang justice. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll be on a night bus to Hoi An to start exploring the north of Vietnam.