Dalat, Vietnam

James and I are just finishing up our time in Dalat. A mountain town at about 5,000 ft of elevation. Tonight we fly to Ho Chi Minh city, and we are currently holed up in a coffee shop as it monsooning outside, but luckily this is the first major rain we have seen.

We started our trip by visiting the "crazy house". A house with narrow stairs and walkways everywhere forming a maze. It was interesting but swamped with tourists.

The next day we rented mopeds and explored the waterfalls around the city. Oddly enough, Vietnam has turned it's waterfalls into launching points for essentially theme parks. There were rides, petting zoos, animal rides, "museums" (for example"the crazy animal museum", but real ones) all next to the falls.
One such waterfall had some pretty miserable looking elephants and other animals that didn't look well treated, but were all ridable (which we did not do).

At one of the waterfalls was a series of Buddhist temples at stages up a mountain. The "ride" was closed that day, so you had to hike it. Luckily, that meant no one else did it. Along the path was statues of all the zodiac animals with a very decorated rooster.

We also explored the country side a bit.

Yesterday we went canyoning. Very cool and we got to really see the "jungles of Vietnam" when we were several miles into the canyon and away from tourists points. We couldn't bring our own cameras so not many photos. It included one 36 foot cliff dive and a 2 person natural water slide.