Day 243 - Braving the bikes to tour around Dalat

This morning we woke to the sound of buses honking - but it's a nice change from our alarm! After brekky we set off with Quinn, another traveller staying at our hotel, on the motorbikes. Our first destination was Lat Village - 12km out of town on beautiful sweeping roads that made their way through the mountainside to the base of Lang Bian Mountain. Driving through the village only took us a couple of minutes on the rocky/muddy "road" but we continued on through to climb a bit higher and get a good view of the village.
From above we had views of valleys and over farms that looked so organised and manicured that the crops could have been planted using a ruler and they still wouldn't be straighter. Another striking feature of the fields was the amazing irrigation system, that utilises hollow bamboo stalks as pipes.
Back in the village we wandered around and checked out the wooden church, complete with stained glass windows. Afterwards we were invited into a party in celebration of a slaughtering the previous day of a buffalo. Inside the shop where we parked our bikes, a young girl was weaving on a traditional loom, to make the beautiful material and goods for sale.Back on our cruising machines we made a stop for ice coffee / tea and watch the world go by, before heading back to town for lunch. After charging our camera and filling up we hit the road again. Well, for a few hundred metres anyway - as it was then that we realised that our back tyre was flat.

We stopped to have it repaired and headed off in the direction of the Datanla Waterfall. Not long into the ride our tyre failed us again on the dodgy downhill slope so Adam set off for a sketchy ride, while Quinn gave Liv a ride back to a new fix-it man, where we decided to get an entire new tube! We were soon on our way to the waterfall again!

When we got there we descended a rather steep path down through a pine forest, listening to birds chirp as we went, all the time thinking about how we had to walk all the way back up again!!
The waterfall itself was pretty, and we got a great view from above when we climbed the muddy path, where we also managed to find a couple of fishermen as they fished from a secluded fishing hole nestled in the bush.

Back in Dalat the three of us had dinner on a table on the street, after which Adam and Quinn enjoyed several beers from Quinn's balcony and watched local families prepare for the Tet festival by cleaning every inch of their house!

Adlibing the highland roads of Dalat.