Another beach, another waterfall - just another week in Vietnam

Although we had a good time in Saigon, it's a really busy city and after a few days we found ourselves flicking through the guidebook for somewhere peaceful and pretty to chill out. Preferably a beach.

We chose the little coastal town of Mui Ne partly because it's just a few hours from Saigon, but mainly because of all the fantastic reviews we'd read about its beaches online. In fact, our Lonely Planet guide went as far as to describe it as 'the best all-round beach in Vietnam'. So you can imagine how excited I was when we checked into our hotel and saw a quiet little sun lounger area with steps leading down to the beach - perfect! Until I walked over to see the sea crashing roughly against the bottom half of the steps and not a grain of sand in sight. That's not a beach, it's just a bit of seafront!

The tide finally went out at around 4pm, leaving a narrow strip of sand littered with bits of driftwood, the odd shell, plastic cups and pieces of polystyrene. Hardly paradise. Although to be fair, if you ignored this bit, the view in general was quite nice, and we spent the majority of our stay gazing out at it from beside the hotel pool.


We did discover a nicer stretch of beach about 10 minutes away, but a lot of it's taken up by bigger beach resorts. We also hired a motorbike to visit the red sand dunes nearby, and had another go at playing Indiana and Jones. We rented out plastic sheets from some kids and took turns riding down the dunes, although we'd foolishly decided to go in the early afternoon and the baking heat meant our fun didn't last very long.

After about two turns each we were hot and bothered, covered in sand, and just about ready to jump back into the pool!

I know you probably all think we're having a whale of a time with all this glorious sunny weather every single day, but it often gets too much and some days we're too hot to want to do anything at all. Most days it's around 34C! Believe it or not, we miss the weather back home - apparently it's only just hitting 24C in London, which sounds very appealing when you're melting on the other side of the world!

With this in mind, we headed inland to the hills of Dalat for a few days, where the weather is a lot cooler (around 21C) and the views are absolutely stunning. Here's a round up of our stay there:

We had a picnic lunch at Datanla waterfalls. The falls were cool, but the best bit was the rollercoaster ride that you can take to get down to them - such a genius idea!


We also visited Cam Ly waterfalls which was a total disappointment unfortunately - fake, gimmicky and smelly. And they had this poor old horse painted up like a zebra!

We had a wander around the local market. It's not huge, but it's possibly one of the best markets we've visited. We bought candied kiwi and strawberries, the best strawberry shake I've ever had, and ate a delicious lunch of braised pork and rice.

Dalat is surrounded by enormous green hills, and the best way to take in the views turned out to be via a cable car ride. We took far too many photos of course. I've selected just a couple of the best for you here:

There wasn't much to do when we got to the other end, so we sat in a little cafe and had a cup of artichoke tea, which is a Dalat specialty and surprisingly nice.


We also had a lot of noodle soup with wonton dumplings, pork-filled baguettes, strawberry wine, Vietnamese coffee, banana cake and Dalat-produced red wine. All in all, it's probably been our favourite place in Vietnam so far!