Đà Lạt: Vietnam's Cool-Weather Escape
We left Hồ Chí Minh City at midnight for Đà Lạt, packed into a sleeper bus with my co-teachers from the English center .
It was April 28, 2017, and a rare long weekend had lined up for us. Hùng Kings Festival (Giỗ Tổ Hùng Vương), Reunification Day, and Labor Day all fell close together, and none of us were about to waste it sitting around the city.
The bus was full of other people doing the same thing we were, trying to get some sleep before whatever waited for us at the other end. Seven hours on the road, and then we stepped off into what felt like a completely different country.
A fairytale kind of cold in Đà Lạt
Hồ Chí Minh City was burning hot when we left it. Đà Lạt was cold and foggy.
That was the first thing I noticed, before anything else. The air itself. Trees and flowers lined the streets, and everything felt peaceful in a way the city never really let itself be.
It felt like walking into a fairy tale. Cold, quiet, a little unreal after months of tropical heat pressing down on everything.
The buildings gave it away too. French colonial architecture, block after block, nothing like Hồ Chí Minh City. You could tell this used to be a hill station, built by people who wanted an escape from the exact same heat we'd just left behind.
Everything we packed into a few days
We didn't have much time, so we packed in as much as we could.
We started around Hồ Xuân Hương, the crescent-shaped lake right in the center of the city. It's actually artificial, dammed by the French back in 1919 and rebuilt a few times after a storm wrecked the original dam in the '30s. Walking around it, ringed by pine trees and old French buildings, it's easy to see why people call it the heart of Đà Lạt.
From there we took the cable car up to Thiền Viện Trúc Lâm, gliding for about ten minutes over pine forest and drifting mist before reaching the hilltop. The monastery sits above Hồ Tuyền Lâm, quiet and carefully kept, more garden than temple in places.
We picked strawberries at a strawberry and sunflower farm, then stopped by an artichoke farm nearby. Đà Lạt is one of the only places in Vietnam cool enough to actually grow artichokes well, something French colonists brought over a century ago. It's turned into one of the city's signature crops since, sold everywhere as tea and souvenirs.
We wandered Chợ Đà Lạt for local souvenirs, and visited Chùa Linh Phước as well. Locals call it the Bottle Pagoda, because so much of it, including an entire 49-meter dragon sculpture, is covered in broken glass and ceramic shards pieced together like a mosaic. It's strange and beautiful in a way that's hard to explain unless you've stood in front of it.
We also stopped to see Ga Đà Lạt, the old railway station, a leftover from a French-built line that once ran over 80 kilometers through the mountains. We didn't ride it, just watched the old train sitting at the platform. Only a short stretch of track still runs today, but the station itself, with its triangular French Art Deco roofline, was worth seeing on its own.
Before heading back, we stopped by the clay tunnel near Hồ Tuyền Lâm, an odd, sprawling installation of red clay sculptures shaped into miniature versions of Đà Lạt's own landmarks, its old train station, its churches, its lake, mixed in with scenes from local folk stories.
It was a lot for a short trip. There's still a long list of things we didn't get to, which is probably reason enough to come back someday.
Food that fought the cold
Every meal there felt like it was trying to warm you up from the inside.
Day one was bún bò Huế, beef noodle soup, with hot tea on the side. Some days it was phở bò instead. One night, hot pot, which felt almost necessary in that kind of weather.
You want something hot in your hands constantly when it's that cold, and the food seemed to know it.
In between the main meals, we kept finding smaller things to try. Bánh tráng nướng, the Vietnamese "pizza." Bắp nướng, grilled corn straight off the coals. Sữa đậu nành nóng, hot soy milk, which I hadn't really had anywhere else in Vietnam. And kem trái cây, fruit ice cream, which somehow still worked even in the cold. Every single thing we ate there tasted like it belonged to the weather it came from.
The host who made the trip
What I still think about most, though, wasn't the lake or the farms.
It was our Airbnb host.
She was one of the sweetest, most accommodating people I met on that whole trip. She fed us fruit she didn't have to. She helped us rent motorbikes without any hassle. She checked in on us for the entire stay, the kind of care you don't really expect from someone you're just paying to sleep in their spare room.
The trip went as smoothly as it did because of her.
It's made me think that staying with a local, instead of a hotel, does something a hotel just can't. You get handed a small piece of the actual place, not just a room inside it. Culture first, and everything else comes after that.
What actually stayed with me
The pace, more than anything.
Đà Lạt moves slow. Nobody's rushing. It's the opposite of Hồ Chí Minh City in almost every way, and after months of the city's noise and heat, my whole body relaxed into it without me really trying.
I've never liked sweating. So a place cold enough that you don't have to think about it, physically, did something for me I didn't expect a change in climate to do. It wasn't just nicer weather to look at. It was actual relief, the kind you feel in your whole body.
Three things I'd tell you before you go
Skip the holidays if you can. We went during a long weekend, and the crowds at every attraction reflected it. Locals travel around the country during holidays too, so Đà Lạt gets packed fast. A normal week makes for a much calmer trip.
Rent a motorbike, if someone in your group can drive one. We didn't have licenses, and we were still allowed to rent. Get insurance regardless. You never know, and it's worth the peace of mind.
Consider staying with a local instead of a hotel, if you can. It won't always go the way ours did, but when it does, it changes the whole trip. You get let into the place, not just parked in it.
We only had a few days, and there's still a long list of things we didn't get to. More farms, more food, more of that cold air. It's less a regret than a reason. I already know I'm going back .
If you want to see more of that trip instead of just reading about it, I put together a travel vlog on YouTube — worth a watch if you want the cold, foggy version of Đà Lạt in motion.