HCMC to Dalat

We arrived in Dalat last night, a mountain city about a 7 hour bus ride from HCMC. We're staying in the rather posh Dalat Novotel. Rather by necessity than choice as most of the local accommodation is booked out. Tomorrow is a national holiday to celebrate the liberation of Saigon so everyone has come up here as it's a bit of a destination for locals. Not that we really knew that on the way here. Fun and games. So we have a place to stay tonight but we need to secure something for the holiday tomorrow, hopefully we'll hear something soon. We've pretty much had enough of bus rides for the time being, it took a really long time to get out of the city and for the bulk of the journey the driver was on the horn every thirty seconds for for the whole time whilst simultaneously trying to break some kind of land speed record. Why beep once when 8-10 times might do? Combined with mountain roads, buckets of trucks and scooters we were pretty glad to get off! I should point out that we did see some interesting stuff while we were on the bus, such as a whole region that seemed to be full of Christian churches, and a lot of statues on peoples balconies of either Jesus or Mary. Or both, sometimes with neon halos. Business sign of the day: Hung Phat Computers. We also saw a miniature Eiffel Tower at one of the towns on the way up to Dalat - Dalat has their own Eiffel Tower too, a bit of a nod to the French colonial history. We will have one more bus ride to get from here to another city a few hours away, after that we can catch the Reunification Express (train) all the way to Hanoi and stop where we like on the way.