Our guide Tuan and his driver are punctual as we set off to see some slivers of life in the countryside around Da Lat. Even though we booked a small group tour, there are no other takers for today, and we’re lucky to set off alone. Tuan’s English is really quite good, and he is excited to be able to practice with us all day. He’s an interesting window into a country where lack of communication makes understanding the culture and what is going on around us challenging, but he is up for the task as we pepper him with questions all day long.
Our stops are many. We visit greenhouses full of flowers and vegetables—the heart of Da Lat’s economy. We step into the coffee fields, a silk factory, a cricket farm(they’re raised for protein rich snack food), and we also take in pretty Elephant Waterfall, the adjacent pagoda, and wander some back roads to see how the ethnic minorities in the region live. Our final stop is the “Crazy House”, back in the city, devised by a female architect who seems to have a touch of Gaudi, and who was much resented by the political class, but has been “let be” as her father was a bigwig in the communist secretariat. She continues to add to the labyrinthine structure.
Perhaps the most outlandish experience of the day is visiting the “weasel coffee” house. Here Tuan takes us in to see caged weasels, which he pronounces are—“very stinky”. They are taken out to find/sniff out the ripest coffee, which they then eat. (I think that they’re probably just fed coffee fruits here). Their waste is then collected, washed to clean off the still whole beans. Dried and then lightly roasted, these beans purportedly make a less bitter and healthier drink(as the weasel’s digestion appears to add some sort of magical enzymes to the mix). Fact or fiction? Hard to know, but Andres went ahead and had a cup—although he’s not putting his stamp of approval on the drink any time soon!
We also really enjoyed the silk factory, a very small family affair, where you can see everything from the silkworms eating mulberry leaves, spinning cocoons, the unraveling of the cocoons into silk threads, spinning these threads onto large spools, and finally the mechanical looms with the Player-Piano like cardboard patterns clacking away while weaving beautiful cloth.
Perhaps most amusing of all was the fact that it was International Women’s Day, a holiday apparently taken very much to heart in Vietnam. Tuan regaled us with stories about what his female friends expect from him—“even though just my friend, not girlfriend”. Flowers, presents, and most striking, everywhere we went in the countryside, hordes of women were gathered together for festivities, singing and food. “It’s like their day off. Tomorrow back to cooking and cleaning and taking care of children,” Tuan explained to us. He was adamant that this was only “fair”, considering that Vietnamese men are by his account still very chauvinistic, and waste hours on end smoking and drinking coffee with their equally indolent cronies. And, sadly, that very much matched our observation of what appears to go on. People wished me “Happy Woman’s Day” everywhere, and Tuan took Andres to task, inquiring what special things he had in store for me, deciding to get the whole day off to a good start by picking a rose in the flower gardens, smiling broadly the whole time.
As has been the case several times now, always a breath of fresh air to actually communicate with a local. Check out pictures from the day below. Tomorrow we move back to the coast and the town of Nha Trang.
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