day 2
we awoke early- they brought us to a local house up the road from where we were staying, where they made rice wine. chan told how they went about making it, boiling it and fermenting it. aoife was saying it was like making poitin. i wonder how she knows that. ha ha but rice instead of potatoes.
after that on the road alittle way we were brought to local fields where coffee and pepper was grown. silly us we took one of the peppers off the tree and bit into it, it was quite strong and hot. aoife ended up choking for some water. aoife was very interested in the coffee what else woke her up every morning but cafe sua- iced coffee. she even got me drinking the stuff and if you guys know me you know i don't drink coffee.
and drove nearby to what they called the big waterfall. well afer seeing the small waterfall at the place we were staying last night we were really sure how big they meant. well they meant big. now i don't think it was any niagra falls but we were pretty impressed. bon came trkking with us. we had a nice walk around them, i think there was about 3 or 4 different ones. and afterwards we went and had a swim in a fresh brook. it was really nice and the current was quite strong so it felt like we were swimming in the one spot, well we were, we weren't going any where.
after lunch we went for an elephant ride. the idea of it was very exciting, like come on riding an elephant. the animal was beautiful but i just felt so sorry for it. i really wanted to like meet the people taking care of them and to tell us about them but it was just a ride on an elephant. i thought it was abit cruel especially when we first arrived there was one chained to a stump, and it was rocking back and forth. i'm not sure if its something they always do? but to me it looked real sad. and sitting on those sits on the back of them i just hope we weren't hurting them. i don't know if i would do that again.
on a lighter note- i have to say i'll never say hung like a horse any more. its hung like a elephant. ha ha
that night we were really good in bed by 8 o clock. i think we over did it the night before.
day 3
the next day was fun. the best bike ride ever. driving through the hills on our way to dalat up in the mountains. loads of people told us if we went to sapa there was no need to go to dalat because they were so simiular. i don't know if they had thier eyes closed or not. i didn't see anything that reminded me of sapa. i only thing was i was hoping that sapa wouldn't eventually become like dalat.
before we got there though we stopped at a few places along the way. first was silk weaving. where we were brought to a silk factory, bon and chan both weighed themselves on this huge weighing scale. needlessly to say we didn't copy them. the factory was very cool. as you walked in there were rows and rows of silk cocoons. they had one lady working on an old silk extracting machine and then the were about 4 rows of more advanced machines. then off to the side were weaving machines moving back and forth, it was all really cool. and in a bucket were all these dead worms that came from the cocoons of silk. it was all really interesting.
the next stop was at a weaving school. where we saw them weaving different patterns. the stuff there was beautiful and i couldn't walk away without buying a couple of bags. i'm going have a mountain of bags to come home too.
the ride to dalat was fun going up and down mountains, driving around bends but also i thought i had a sore bum before. it got worse. cause the road in some places also got worse. so we were bouncing along on the bike going through potholes and over stones. owwww.
we stopped at one stage to rest our bums and look at the view and bon went to give me a flower but he had done this trick on me once before so i was wise enough not to fall for it again. what happened was he has a flower in his hand and goes to hand it to you and you grab a hold of the bottom of the stem but when he pulls away i'm left standing with the stem and he walks away with the flower cause he had broken it before hand. its a neat little trick but i wasn't going to fall for it twice. ha ha while we were sitting there i was pulling the petals off the flower like you would when you playing, he loves, he loves me not. when bon saw me, laughing he told me how to say it in vietnamese. which he found hilarious because its damn hard to say. "eewwuna, khong eewwuna"
when we finally arrived to dalat it was still quite early and we said since it was our last night together we would have a few drinks and go to karaoke. we were orginally suppose to go for dinner too but we couldn't decide on were to eat and the lads wouldn't walk anywhere. anywhere further than across the road, warrants a bike or a taxi. lazy feckers. so we decided we would meet up later.
when we met, we went to the local market to get me vodka as they said that the karaoke place only served beer. i was wondering was wondering what kind of place only served beer?
chan and bon decided to drink vodka with me so we were to split the cost but i had no change and i said i would get him later. as we were walking away with our vodka, aoife decided to drink vodka with us and was going to go back a buy more but we had a big bottle and said it was fine just share with us. chan got us a taxi to bring us down to this karaoke bar. it was only down the road, we were only in the taxi like 5 mins.
so when we walked in to the place we broke our backs laughing, it was individual karaoke rooms. so we had our own livingroom style karaoke booth just for the 4 of us. well i divided the drinks quite quickly, needed some dutch courage for this. bon went first. he only sang veitnamese songs but i have to say he was brilliant. chan was next. he thought he was shit hot and he wasn't really. and then aoife and me decided we would sing together. aoife was really the only one who was singing i took me awhile to make a fool of myself. well if you heard aoife sing before you know she can sing. so once she got started she didn't stop. at one stage i idn't even get enough time to look at the karaoke bok to pick a song cause aoife had grabbed it back off me. i think she even had a fight with chan to whos turn it was ha ha.
myself and bon just got drunk and had a laugh. he is actually a very funny vietnamese. all night we had a joke going that i would beat him up and he would pretend to call his mummy. susanne knows this one (although i actually beat her) so needless to say when it was time for us to go back to our hotel and he said he was call his mummny. in my drunken state said i wanted to call my mummy. so like the gem he was he gave me his phone and i called mom. sorry mom! i hate to think of how much it cost him and we never did give chan any money towards the drinks.
