After two days and two nights of bus travel we have finally arrived to our southernmost destination in the mountains – Dalat. The first information we received still on the bus was that today was the second last day of Vietnamese holiday and that all the hotels will be full and therefore we might have trouble finding an accommodation. Accommodation for a reasonable price was seem to be definitely out of the question! Couldn’t they tell us this in Nha Trang before we booked to go to Dalat?!? Not these guys I suppose… Great!

Once out of the bus we first refused and later had to accept an offer for a 20 dollar room as that was really the cheapest we could find. When I returned to this hotel to accept their offer, the price went from 20 to 25 dollars in the meantime. After a long negotiation we came back down to 20 bucks for the night but it took another looong time to make them to check us in and state the agreed price on paper. I’m pretty sure they were still waiting for some other tourist to pass by and offer to pay more. This (fortunately) didn’t happen and as I passed a deposit to the owner of the hotel Tanja, who was waiting for me in the hotel we originally arrived to, entered the reception room. She was with an Easy Rider (see in following article), telling me that this guy offered to help us find cheaper accommodation and that he didn’t want any money for it. As I already signed and paid the deposit we agreed that we would stay there for the night and that we would try to find a cheaper room the next day. We also agreed to meet this Easy Rider in the morning to inform him whether or not we wanted to take a tour in or around the city with him. We already knew these guys (meaning Easy Riders) are a great bunch from our Lonely Planet book that we bought second hand earlier in Hanoi.

We spent the rest of the day discovering the new city again and tasting new foods. Among others we visited a beautiful gallery of embroidery in the city centre. I first thought that I was looking at painted pictures until I realized these were all embroidered – AMAZING!! And they sell their weeks and months of diligent work for comparably nothing.