The air-conditioned town

Dalat in a first glimpse might resemble Nazareth. It is made of colourful houses that have little to do with one another, placed on hills. The hills somehow shelter the city from the heat, making the weather here a very comfortable 16-22 degrees year round and sometimes rainy. None of the hotels here have AC or even fans. The French built their resort villas here to flee the heat.

That day we moved to our new hotel, which was also far from being perfect. The room we were shown the day before had been taken, so we were given another. The double room we got was clean (MUCH cleaner than the rooms in the previous hostel we stayed in) and sunny with a balcony. The WiFi in the hotel was not working because it was not configured properly, and the staff seemed in no rush to fix it, since I guess it was working for their phones.

Only 2 days later there seemed to be progress with the network availability, after someone mysteriously reset all the routers to factory defaults, forcing the staff to fix the WiFi and thus doing a huge service to the rest of the guests. It is a shame they will never know who is this mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel to whom they owe their thanks. Oh well.

We set out to find the Crazy House, an attraction built by a local architect. We ended up walking halfway there when it started to rain and we decided to spend the rest of the day in the hotel, blogging and arting.

At some point we realized we forgot our charging bank at the shitty hostel so Guy called them to ask if they found it. They sure did. We went up the street to fetch it and found the receptionist using our charger to watch movies on her phone. That charger holds a sentimental value since it was a very thoughtful gift to us from a lovely Chinese host.

On our way back we stopped to eat dinner at seafood street stall that had a lovely collection of mussels and offered them grilled with sauce. We chose a nice selection of our favorite mollusks and enjoyed eating them sitting on the small plastic chairs on the street. The locals at the next table offered Guy some of their rice liquor to try. It was a dinner to be remembered.

After dinner, we went for a second dinner in a vegetarian restaurant Guy had found where they have good and cheap food but strange service: They brought our first couple of dishes quickly but forgot the third one, and when we reminded them, they brought it in a to-go box because they don't speak any English and assumed that we wanted it to go. Supposedly it's a popular restaurant with Buddhist nuns, but there were many foreigners there so it's surprising they haven't learned any English. We also booked our canyoning trip for later this week, and bought some baked goods to have with our tea from a big bakery I found.