We had booked onto a tour for today so we were up, breakfasted and ready by 8.30. We were picked up in a mini van with 6 others to spend the day with. Our tour guide was called 'xu' and she was really nice. First stop was one of the many allotments to see how they grow all of the beautiful flowers here. Apparently dalat is famous for their flowers and many Vietnamese order flowers from here from all over the country. It's all done naturally with no chemicals but the flowers are all perfect! We then went to a coffee farm and were shown how the coffee is grown and the different types of beans.
After a look around we went up into a lovely little log cabin on stilts where you could buy coffee to drink there or buy some to take away. They even had some weasel coffee which is made by feeding the weasels the coffee plants, waiting for them to poo it all out before cleaning it and grinding the beans for coffee! They had a big pot of weasel coffee beans and next to it a different pot with weasel poop in for you to see, I thought it was very funny because the Vietnamese say poo in a funny way! After that we went to a weasel farm, which I wasn't too sure on because a lot of them were kept in bare cages with nothing to do. There was an open pen area that looked good but only about 20% of the animals were in it. They also showed us how they make the local dalat wine which we didn't taste because it smelt foul and it seemed very similar to the wine we had in Nepal which was disgusting.
After seeing that we went to a crickets farm where they have lots of different areas with different kinds of crickets in each section. They fill the space with dried leaves and there are thousands of crickets in each part, you can hear them all munching on the leaves and scuttling should in unison when somebody gets near to their enclosure. They also usually keep lizards and other kinds of reptile too. We were invited through to the back to try a selection of them that had been cooked, that is what they're there for after all. I didn't mind in the slightest because they were less than half the size of the ones I'd already eaten in Thailand so I got stuck in and picked a little one out to try. The only other people out of the 7 others was the Vietnamese couple and one guy from the USA. Nobody else would even try!! Xu was showing us which was thebest to eat from the selection, pointing out a big one. Although the reasoning she gave was because it was a pregnant female and it's classed more of a delicacy to have insects full of eggs! Needless to say nobody seemed to go for that one.
We then went to a silk factory to see how silk was made. It was really interesting because they had thousands of cocoons with the worms inside. She said if left for another week or so they would hatch out as butterflies but they use them for the silk before that happens. They put the cocoon in not water to soak and by hand start pulling away all the silk fibres from the cocoon and attaching it all to a machine that clumps it all together into sheets. It's all very fascinating but I also felt sad for the silk worms :(
We did a lot of driving through the country side which was very nice, before arriving at elephant waterfall. It was quite a way down to get to the bottom, and quite dangerous really because it was slippy and there wernt really any steps. But once at the bottom you could go right near the waterfall which was so cool because you got soaked just by standing near it! And the wind from the force of the water blows everywhere do it was really good to stand there for a bit before heading back up. After stopping for lunch we then went to the train station, which Liam and I wern happy about because it wasn't in the itinerary we were given and we'd walked all that way yesterday to see it. All we did was go and look at the train and leave....very disappointing! Plus the part we were both mostly looking forward to, and the reason we chose that tour, was cut out for some reason. We were supposed to go to a minority village, the train station was a complete let down!
But it didn't matter so much because then we went to the crazy house which was well, crazy! It was designed by a Vietnamese lady who studied architecture in Moscow. It was opened to the public in 1990 but won't actually be fully completed until 2015. It's in the style of a big tree coming out of the ground, there are no right angles anywhere, everything is curved and twisted like tree branches. There are 10 rooms at present, all with a different theme involving some kind of animal of living thing. There are crazy bridges in the form of branches that are really high to go from one part of the house to the other,areas with little ponds and bridges in them and its all very fairytale-esque. It's open to tourists now but is also used as a hotel where people who I can only assume are weirdos, book the rooms out. The rooms that are booked have wooden shutters across the door way with a lock so you can't go in but can still see the whole room. It's all very bizarre! We spent an hour in there before going back to the hotel. After coffee and cake at one of the cafes and food later on at a lovely restaurant we packed our stuff ready for another move tomorrow.
