Location · Southern Highlands
Da Lat
Pine forest, flower farms and fifteen hundred metres of cool air.
Pine forest, flower farms and fifteen hundred metres of cool air.
Fifty minutes by air from Saigon and a different climate entirely. Da Lat is the one place in Vietnam where a full gown is comfortable in the middle of the day, and the one that photographs least like the rest of the country.
The French built a hill station here to escape the heat, and the shape of that is still everywhere: villas with shutters, pine along the ridges, a lake in the middle of town. Around the edges it is farmland. Flower fields, greenhouses lit up like lanterns at dusk, and tea on the slopes further out.
The honest part: Da Lat has grown fast and the centre of town is busier and more built-up than the photographs you have seen suggest. The good locations are twenty to forty minutes out, which is why a private car makes a real difference here and why we quote one.
Temperature sits between about fifteen and twenty four degrees all year. Bring a jacket for the early start: at half past five in January it is genuinely cold.
Hair and make-up before dawn, the forest while the mist is still in it, a break through the middle of the day, then the farms or the hills in the late afternoon. Six working hours, two locations.
A Da Lat session is USD 1,480, and our travel and accommodation are already inside that number. A private car for you on the day is USD 65. Everything else is as usual: hair and make-up, two gowns and one suit, 300 to 400 original files and 40 retouched photographs.
USD 1,480 for six hours, and that already includes our team's travel from Hanoi or Saigon and our accommodation. A private car for you on the day is USD 65. The session includes hair and make-up, two gowns and one suit, 300 to 400 original files and 40 fully retouched photographs.
Fly. It is about fifty minutes from Saigon and under two hours from Hanoi to Lien Khuong airport, then forty minutes by road into town. Driving up from Saigon takes six to seven hours, which we would not recommend the day before a session.
Da Lat sits at fifteen hundred metres and stays between roughly fifteen and twenty four degrees all year, which is why it is the one place in Vietnam where a heavy gown is comfortable at midday. December to March is the dry season. May to October brings rain in the afternoon, so we shoot mornings.
Pine forest, flower farms, greenhouses on the hillsides, a lake, French-era villas, and old cars. It looks less like South East Asia than anywhere else we shoot, which is exactly why couples choose it.
Yes for two locations. If you want the pine forest at sunrise and the flower farms in the late afternoon, that is a comfortable day. Three or more locations means a second day, because the drives between them are twenty to forty minutes each.