Day 381: To Dalat

Today I took an early bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Dalat, a town in the Vietnamese highlands. The bus company had predicted that the bus would take about six hours; in reality, however, the journey took us close to eight hours. I had the dubious luck of sitting right behind the driver - in a country where it is customary to honk at most motorbikes just before you overtake them, that's a seat your ears and nerves definitely don't want to have. My solution was simply to listen to loud music for much of the journey, but that didn't help the slow progress we were making and the often reckless overtaking maneuvers I saw the driver make.

Anyway, we made it safely to Dalat in the late afternoon, maybe an hour before nightfall. Not enough time to do anything more substantial than check into my hotel, find something to eat, and make plans for tomorrow.