Da Lat, Ho Chi Minh City

The plane arrived in Ho Chi Minh City two hours late and it was almost 12 o'clock. If the taxi couldn't get a taxi, I had to take a motorcycle to the city and take the night bus at 1 o'clock to Da Lat Đà Lạt. When I arrived in the urban area, I caught up with the mighty army of motorcycles celebrating the (draw) after the football game. After various road closures, I turned left and right and finally arrived at the night station. If I was five minutes later, I would not be able to catch up with this train. As soon as I got in the car, I met a Singaporean Chinese who had worked in Ho Chi Minh City for seven years. He quickly added WeChat to share with me the food in Ho Chi Minh City. Foodies are everywhere! The night train drove for 4 hours and arrived in Da Lat at 5 o'clock in the morning.

Dalat City in southern Vietnam is surrounded by pine forests, dense lakes, blooming flowers, and French-style villas everywhere. It feels like you are in a French town. Before noon, I went to Dalat Flower Park, Dalat Catholic Church, Bao Dai Summer Palace, and Xuan Huong Lake.

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The most amazing thing is the Crazy House Dalat. After entering the door, I couldn't believe my eyes. The architecture is unique, colorful and imaginative, just like Alice in Wonderland.

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Dalat Railway Station

Yesterday, after walking around for half a day and finishing shopping in Da Lat city, I decided to climb Lang Biang Mountain in my spare time. Use Grab software to go to the foot of the mountain. A local friend sent me a step-by-step diagram to guide me how to go up the small dirt road next to me without buying tickets. This is the first time I have climbed this kind of mountain alone, and I have always met my companions before. After successfully "straying in", I found that everything in the pine forest looks the same, and it is easy to get lost, so I can only rely on Google Maps to record the itinerary. Now I am still a little afraid of not being able to find my way or getting lost in the big forest in the movie. When climbing, the pine branches on the ground are covered with a layer, and it is especially slippery when the slope is very steep. The terrain changes more and more as you go up, more wet soil and high steps and rocks, especially the last few hundred meters are extremely difficult. At the last 160-meter sign, a British couple decided to return due to road conditions, which is a pity. When I climbed to the top of more than 2100 meters, my whole body was soaked, but the scenery was really beautiful. There were three or two people resting on the top, and I didn't see anyone else when I went down the mountain. It took a total of more than four hours to return to the foot of the mountain before the sun went down.

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When I came from the city, I took a motorcycle for about 10 kilometers. When I got to the foot of the mountain, I found that it was too far away to get a car, and there was no public transportation to go back. In desperation, I saw a tourist coming down from the main entrance on a mountain bike. I asked him how he was going back to the city. He said he rented a motorcycle and came by himself. Seeing that I couldn’t get a car by myself, he offered to take me back together. city. I am so grateful. Chatting along the way, I found that this big Italian brother is also a colleague. He used to be an Italian teacher in a German school in Italy. Last month, he only traveled by train and car in southern China for a month. Along the way in Vietnam, he learned all kinds of honks from the locals, saying that he could no longer do so when he returned to Italy, and he had to hurry up and honk more while he was here. When I arrived in the urban area, I insisted on inviting him to eat skewers at the night market to thank him. Along the way, because of motorcycles and various people, I should also learn to drive motorcycles! It feels like a survival skill in Vietnam! Today broke the single-day walking record, walking nearly 32 kilometers.

Today I ate Hue's beef noodle soup bun bo hue and the local specialty Da Lat pizza banh trang nuong for the first time.

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Let me share with you the experience of being a couchsurf for the first time. I have always heard about the platform Couchsurfing, but never had the guts to try it. It was not until the night before leaving Nanjing that a foreign teacher friend strongly recommended it to me based on her personal experience, so I downloaded this software two days before starting my backpacking trip in Southeast Asia. This platform is mainly for locals to provide a room in their home, more often their bedroom or living room, to strangers who come to their city for free accommodation. As far as I know, there are two types of sofa owners. One is that they do not have the opportunity to travel around. Receiving other travelers provides them with an opportunity to go out of their own country, understand the culture of other countries in the world, and practice their language. Another is that I used to be a sofa surfer, and in order to repay this group, I enthusiastically and selflessly help more travelers. As a woman traveling alone, using this software does have potential safety hazards, after all, she is going to live in a stranger's house. But on this platform, you can check the past reception experience of the sofa owner and the comments of the sofa guest, which is more reliable. In fact, male couch-surfers are not necessarily completely safe. A male couch-surfer I know said that it was strange that the sofa owner who received him once was gay. But most of the experiences I've heard from people have been pretty good.

Saving money is not the biggest reason why I want to try couchsurfing, after all, accommodation in Southeast Asia is very cheap. The main reason is to understand the life and culture of the local people. It was my first time to be a couch-surfer, after all, considering the safety issue, I found two Vietnamese guys who co-operated with homestay, and they accommodated groups of couch-surfers, so I was not the only one staying there. They have a lot of good reviews, and they would love to have couchsurfing for an hour to teach English to some Vietnamese students if they have the time.

I took the night train to Da Lat and they arrived before they got up in the morning. The door was unlocked and I went in and put down the big backpack and went out. I didn't see them until I came back at night. During the day, they would keep sending messages telling me where to eat and play. In the evening, we bought super delicious vegetarian spring rolls together, and we sat and chatted together. I was supposed to help teach English, but I don't need it today. Living here at the same time as me is a young Polish couple who just got engaged while traveling in Laos, and they are also super nice. The two finished their graduate studies last year and worked frugally to save money for a year and decided to travel together for a year. They volunteered to teach English for two weeks when they were in Thailand, and they also went to other countries for exchanges in high school and college. This is their fifth backpacking experience. The most coincidental thing is: their sofa owner in Hanoi turned out to be the sofa owner I met through this platform when I was in Hanoi, but the sofa owner couldn’t receive me because of other sofa guests, but he also met and drove me there by motorcycle Celebrating last week's football win. The world is really small!

There are four rooms on the second and third floors of the sofa owner’s house, three of which are paid for by homestay. Our room was found for free by them through this platform. There is also a world map hanging in the bedroom. Thanks again to my foreign teacher friends in Nanjing for making me dare to try this platform and meet kind, beautiful and enthusiastic people from all over the world!

Early the next morning, we went to Datanla Waterfalls. I met a Miami guy when I was buying tickets. He studied Vietnamese in the United States for six years, and was suspended for one year to study biomedicine. He came to Vietnam for tourism and work for the fifth time. The U.S. government sent him to Hanoi to work with medical students. Go back next June to finish my studies. He has also been to Guangzhou. When the two of us took the small cable car to watch the waterfall and were about to go down, we found that the door could not be opened. The maintenance personnel came to help us open the door and let us go out. It was a false alarm.

The day before yesterday, I met an uncle from Taipei who wanted to take me to play on the sofa guest software. After learning that I was in Ho Chi Minh City, he took the initiative to contact me with his local friends here. I got in touch on the bus from Da Lat back to Ho Chi Minh at noon, and I made an appointment to take me around in the afternoon. This Vietnamese aunt offered to come to the bus station to pick me up and take me to my youth hostel. I said it was really no trouble, it was only a 10-minute walk from the bus station to my youth hostel. If it wasn't because my bus arrived an hour early, she wouldn't be in time, otherwise she would have come to pick me up. And on the bus, I asked her if she knew where she could print in color, and the Taiwan entry card must be printed in color. She said that her family can only print in black and white, but she asked me to send the document to her, and she will help me find a place to print it in color.

Half an hour after I settled in the hostel, my aunt came to see me, and the first thing she did was give me the Taiwan entry pass. Then I found out that she didn’t live close at all, and it took 40 minutes to drive a motorcycle, and it was just to take me, a friend of hers who had never met (and I had never met) around the city, thank you ! After learning that I was a foodie, she spent a long time asking the girl at the front desk of the Youth Hostel for the addresses of various delicious street stalls. In order to save my stomach and taste all the delicacies of Ho Chi Minh tonight, I ate a bowl of vegetarian noodle soup at noon on the way back from the bus. I drank sugarcane juice and vegetable juice at the street stalls, and ate spring rolls bò bía, rice cakes banh beo hue, rice paper slices banh trang tron, desserts and mixed durian sticky rice. Everyone's means of transportation on the street are motorcycles, and there are mountains and seas of cars. My aunt took me to a church in Chinatown. Chatting with my aunt, I learned that she used to recruit foreign pilots and flight attendants at JetStar Airlines, and now there are many discounts for buying air tickets. No wonder her English is so good. I have never seen a Vietnamese of her age so good in English. Her university major is actually French, and her second foreign language is German. My aunt also praised me for my language talent. She and several of my Vietnamese friends were amazed at how I could remember the names of so many Vietnamese foods. I said it was because I was a foodie.

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My aunt told me that I rarely see Chinese tourists. I said no, Chinese tourists are everywhere! Later, I realized what she meant. I rarely see Chinese tourists who travel alone like me, and they are usually a lot of Wuyang Wuyang. Later, I found out that my aunt and my Taiwanese uncle, who had never met, met through the software Sofa Traveler when I was traveling in Taiwan two years ago. My aunt got divorced 8 years ago. Her son is in the Netherlands and her daughter is in Australia. She has traveled all over the world to many places. She said that some friends on the couch contacted her to come to Saigon, and she would take them around by motorcycle. Before she left, I sincerely thanked her for coming all the way to play with me. What she said made my eyes turn red at the time. She said: "While I am helping other people's children, I firmly believe that someone on the other side of the world is doing the same thing to my children." I asked my aunt to hurry up. Apply for a Chinese visa and go to Beijing to play, and you must receive her well!

Later I went to Pub Street Bar Street, Tao Dan Park, Ben Thanh Street Food Market by myself. In fact, before I came to Ho Chi Minh City, I heard from all my Vietnamese friends that the law and order here is very poor, and all kinds of thieves are everywhere. The following are the various safety educations I have received recently: ① You must never walk while looking at your mobile phone. People, both hands clutching the mobile phone and checking again. ②Do not walk close to the motorcycle road, it is better to walk on the sidewalk against the current, so that no motorcycles will snatch you from behind. ③If someone snatches the bag, don't pull it back abruptly, but squat down quickly holding the bag (the girl at the front desk of the youth hostel said it, and she couldn't explain why). In addition, today I was educated by this aunt again on the precautions for riding a motorcycle: ①No backpack, the belt will be cut and snatched away, and it should be stored in the motorcycle seat. ②It is best not to drive the motorcycle seat back and forth, as it will be snatched away in an instant. ③You can’t leave the bagged food on the motorcycle to do other things, and some people will steal it. It made me very defensive all night. In fact, I didn’t feel any sense of insecurity when I walked on the street afterwards. When I communicated with foreign friends, they didn’t feel unsafe either. Why do locals react so differently? It is estimated that there is a high probability that foreign tourists will be robbed out of good intentions.

After posting the Vietnamese aunt’s circle of friends yesterday, a few comments told me to be careful and be vigilant, because there is no kindness for no reason, she must have something in mind. Well, you're right, she really has a plan. She asked me if I could let her nephew (a senior and a Grab motorcycle driver) take me around the city today. I really didn't want to trouble her nephew, but she said she was begging me, because her nephew is a bit autistic, although he speaks good English, but he is more introverted and not good at communicating with others. Open his eyes. Of course I said yes.

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Today, her nephew took me half a day to visit the Saigon City Hall, the bookstore street, the Japanese neighborhood, the post office and the cathedral. I didn't feel that he was autistic. If I took the initiative to ask a lot of questions, he was still very willing to communicate. He talked a lot about the life and study conditions of young people in Vietnam, which was very interesting. He likes Japanese manga, learned basic Japanese by himself, and earns pocket money in his spare time. He seems a bit uncommunicative, but is still very smart and has his own ideas. Before I left, I took the famous Cơm tấm minced rice in Ho Chi Minh City, banh canh cua crab noodle soup and xiu mai, not siu mai, but meatballs. Then he sent me to the airport, and he insisted on paying his fare to the airport before he accepted it.

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In fact, the Taiwan Immigration Department has delayed my Taiwan entry permit for so long, and now I think about it, I am quite happy, otherwise I would never have come to Ho Chi Minh City, nor would I have met so many kind-hearted people who have no intentions. Everything happens for a reason!