strange days in vietnam

So far Vietnam has been quite a weird surreal place. I cancelled my booking through the dodgy travel company, only to discover that its impossible to find one that isn't dodgy....I got a bus to Mui Ne, a beach that smelled like dead fish and cat urine but had cool sand dunes and canyons and then left for Dalat. The bus was 6hours late picking me up and then the "brand new, big air conditioned bus" was really a van crammed with about 15 people plus all their luggage. The hating-vietnam-meter began to rise a little. The good thing was that the van got us to Dalat 3 hours quicker than a bus because the driver obviously had no fear of death and thought nothing of hurtling down the road at a million miles an hour in a game of chicken with various trucks and buses. When we arrived in Dalat the tour office we'd all booked through offered us other services, thinking we were stupid enough to want to book anything else through them, so I told the man he was a liar (evidently one of the worst insults in southeast asia) and he tried pitifully to defend his company, making up all sorts of stories about how the roads were closed and then how the real bus broke down etc etc, and then he tried to calm himself down and nearly cried. Awesome.
So I'm in Dalat, a weird kitschy town with swan boats, penguin rubbish bins, broken down amusements parks with weird figurines and giant mushrooms, and a fake eiffel tower. It's pretty rad, and there's big markets where I can get a vegan feast of fake meat for $1. It resembles Queenstown on drugs, some kind of warped alice in wonderland town, and everyone here wears ski jackets even though its not cold. Ahh, Vietnam.