Breakfast at the Dreams Hotel

Throughout the trip I have had a tough time going local for breakfast. I even like rice porridge, but somehow I need comfort and familiarity before 9.00 AM. Unfortunately the "free breakfast" at most budget hotels is green tea plus either rice porridge with salted shrimp-bits or a piece of toasted Wonderbread and a crispy deep-fried fried egg. So it has been a special delight in Dalat to be enjoying every morning what has to be the best budget-hotel free breakfast in Asia. Eggs however you want, bacon, endless crispy mini-baguettes with peanut butter (or Marmite; yay), platefuls of sliced mango, pineapple, papaya, avocado, tea and coffee... There's even a plate of fresh passionfruit every morning. (For the uninitiated: the inside of a ripe passionfruit looks like luminous snot, and is about the same consistency, and tastes divine.)

This hotel is also spotlessly clean and run by the friendliest, most helpful family in Vietnam. We don't want to leave! Buut the calendar calls and tomorrow (Monday) we will be taking the bus down to the coast at Na Trang before starting to head north by train for Dalat / Hoi An, then Hue, then Hanoi and Halong Bay. Having thought 3 1/2 weeks in Vietnam was almost too much, we are already making decisions about not doing X or Y so that there's time for Z, and greedily wishing we had another couple of weeks here.