A touristy day

This post is a picture-full post. If you are a scroller and not interested in reading, you will definitely like this post.

After going around the Da Lat market and a night full of random conversations, we started the day late and slow. We were quite tired from all the travel the previous days, and really need a long comfortable sleep to go on with our journey. After some breakfast which was mostly fruits and bread for vegetarians and a large heavy meal for non-vegetarians, we started our tourist ride around Da Lat, in a bus.

It was more like a college outing where everyone is travelling together to the same places. It was fun I must say.

An interesting fact that struck was that most (around 75%) of Vietanamese people don’t subscribe to any particular popular religion. The have a combination of some practices followed by tribal religions and some parts of Buddhism and Taoism. Wikipedia calls it out as Irreligion. The second highest at around 14% is Buddhism. The third is Christianity and needless to say, its growing at a good pace.

Truc Lam Zen Monastery

Another interesting fact about Vietnam is that its building/monuments are very new. Mostly built around the 90s. This is because its been under some sort of war or invasion all the time. It has been invaded and ruled by multiple countries like China, France, Japan, United States. I am not going to give chronological order and make it into a history blog.

The Truc Lam Zen Monastery is one such monument which was built around the 90s. It was a beautiful and calm place which obviously had a large Buddha statue and a meditation hall. I meditated there for a few mins and the experience was quite blissful.

The monastery contained a big garden around it and it was filled with a lot of flowers unseen in India. It was a beautiful nice walk around the monastery. There were small lakes and parks sprinkled all around the area.

Clay Tunnel

We then went to a place called the Clay Tunnel. It was build in 2010. It is a massive art-installation has huge sculptures of things right from motobikes to gods to animals etc. It is made really well and its an instagrammers delight. Photos of the sculptures in the Clay tunnel often features in most popular Vietnamese tourist photos. Walking around the Clay Tunnel witnessing all the big sculptures was truly a thrilling experience.

Cable Car

We then took a cable car. I somehow like the idea of travelling by a cable car. It makes you feel like you are a drone flying across the landscape. You are not too high like being on a flight, and you are not too low like standing on a building top. You are high enough to see everything from an arial view and low enough to see the details too. Our cable car ride was through the forests. We were thinking how the trees that came in the way would be cut down, how maintenance is done. As expected, talks and discussions around “what will happen if the cable breaks”, “will we die”, “will be break a limb” etc. did happen.

Linh Phuoc Pagoda

We then went to another Buddhist temple. It was called the Linh Pagoda. This place was built in 1950s and the interesting fact is that the primary materials used to erect it are fragments of glass, porcelain and pottery. You can see the entire structure having made from broken porcelain pieces stuck together to form a mosaic.

Crazy House

We then went to this place called the crazy house. The place was crazy for sure but far away from being called a “house”. Its a huge building built in 1990 by an architect named Dang Viet Nga. It has all weird structures and the architect claims to be inspired by nature. It has structures like trees, spiders, human body parts and so on.

I feel that the architect was smoking something really weird. Not only was the architect smoking up something weird, she also made sure that everyone working on the site were also smoking up. This is an extreme of human imagination.

The place has random walking paths and stairs. Getting from one place to another is almost impossible as the path is extremely convoluted. Its like a huge maze and there is no guarantee that you will be able to find your way through it. The stairs and passages are extremely small and narrow and the railings are also randomly shaped like tree wines.

We went in as a group and got lost as individuals. If you are slightly ahead of someone, there is a very high chance that you will get lost. Even google maps will give up in a place like this. When I got lost, I found it hard to explain to people where I was. You could see some folks at a distance but won’t know how to get there. Some people completely lost their way and it took almost 30 minutes of tiring walking to reach to the exit.

The only way to navigate the space is to smoke up what the architect and the workers smoked up. Unfortunately its kept as a trade secret. May be when you smoke it up, every path and stairway straightens up in your head and you can navigate it like how you navigate a well planned city with parallel roads and alleys. Otherwise, you are bound to get lost.

We somehow, by the grace of god navigated and exited the space. We were already tired as the day was quite hectic and this crazy house drained all the energy left, both physically and mentally inside us. We headed to have some good dinner and later to rest in the resort.

The day was filled with a lot of art, architecture, travel, jokes and fun.