Nature & falls

The main cloud-hunting spot near Da Lat: 1,709 metres, with the cloud sea settling into the valley right below the summit. Twenty to twenty-five minutes from town by bike, then a 20–30 minute walk — short, but in the dark and on dirt.

The one-kilometre gravity coaster down through the pines is the single most-booked activity in Da Lat, and it deserves it.

Seven tiers, a hundred metres wide, and by a distance the most photogenic waterfall in the province. Worth the hour each way.

A loud thirty-metre curtain you can walk behind, with a 24-metre laughing Buddha twenty metres from the gate.

The mountain the city looks at. Radar Peak is a 2.5 km trail, an hour and a half up; the true summit at 2,167 m is a 7 km, 4–5 hour commitment.

A working Zen monastery above Tuyen Lam Lake with the best-kept gardens in Da Lat. The place widens your inner range for beauty by sheer concentration of it per square metre: bonsai terraces, paths with stone lanterns among the pines, flower beds in the courtyards and a white statue in the main hall — all on one hillside. The 2.3 km cable car over pine forest takes twelve minutes and lands at the gate.

A hotel and a park at once: a hundred hectares of pine forest at the foot of Nui Voi — Elephant Mountain — half an hour from Da Lat along the airport road. It is built not as a hotel with a garden but as a park with villas inside it: you are driven around in a buggy, and you can either stay the night or come for the day on a ticket. The themed zones are borrowed from other cultures and each sits on its own slope: a Japanese garden with a red torii gate, a house under a curved roof, clipped ball-shaped shrubs and beds of hydrangeas; a Chinese courtyard with a round moon gate in the wall, a pavilion under a hundred silk lanterns and carved wooden screens; a Korean hanok; a Central Highlands village with longhouses. In the middle is a lake with a fountain, a gilded seated Buddha on a platform in the middle of a white bridge, and above it, up the steps, a Zen monastery with an orange tiled roof and a white statue of Guanyin. Between the zones run stone paths, boardwalks along the stream and benches under bamboo and pines. The lodging is scattered over the hills: three-storey white villas with mansard roofs and flower names — Tulip, Mimosa, Lavender — on one slope, a row of container bungalows with wooden decks above the valley on another. The rooms are modern and expensively finished: backlit timber battens on the wall, a full-height window with two armchairs and a small table, a freestanding tub by a blinded window. The view over the pine hills is the main reason to come: in the rain the mist crawls along the ridges, and you see it just as well from the decks as from the room window.