After a twenty hour trek from Cheorwon to Incheon airport, then Incheon to Shanghai, then Shanghai to Vietnam, I finally touched down in Ho Chi Minh city. I met a bearded Matt at the airport, who had spent the previous week traveling in and around Hanoi.
We spent my first day walking around Saigon, drinking beer in the parks, sampling Vietnamese foods and getting cheap yet amazing massages. This was my second visit to Ho Chi Minh City, and I liked it even better the second time around. After a long day, we caught a night bus to the city of Da Lat. We didn't have high expectations for the city because we barely knew anything about it. When we arrived in the middle of the night, it was a lot cooler in Da Lat than it had been in the sweltering city of Saigon.
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| Matt in Saigon |
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| Baguettes |
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| Lunch? |
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| street cleaning |
Da lat wound up being a little oasis of paradise in the mountains. It used to be called "the little Paris" because it has kept a lot of French influence in its cuisine and architecture. Because the climate there is so mild, they do a lot of farming of vegetables, fruits and flowers.. which is rare for Vietnam, where they usually farm rice. We saw green luscious farms and trees of almost every fruit or vegetable you could think of.. Mangoes, papayas, durian, jack fruit, bananas, strawberries, onions, lettuce, potatoes, coconuts, moon berries, peppers, etc etc. There were veggies I hadn't even hard of before. We spent our first afternoon walking around the city. It was a really cool time to be there because they were getting ready for both the Dalat Hoa (flower) festival and Tet (lunar new year). The city was bustling with people selling exotic flowers, orange trees (that thy put in their house like Christmas trees for Tet), and dragon shaped plants for year of the dragon.
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| Exotic flowers |
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| so much fresh, cheap produce! |
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| Tet (lunar new year) trees |
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| Tet trees shaped like dragons |
We spent our next day in Dalat riding on the backs of motorcycles in the highlands around the city. Our tour guides were a couple of really cool older guys that were part of a tour-guide motorcycle gang called "the easier riders." The man driving me, who went by Rooney, was about 70 years old, had about 3 teeth, and he was a firecracker. He loved America and liked reciting "facts" he knew, such as "Barack Obama is from Kenya.". We found out after talking to him more that he had fought with the Americans during the Vietnam war and had been sent to Georgia to train. He had fought in Dalat and had a lot of interesting information about the area. He fought through the Tet offensive (the night that the communists attacked during a new year's cease fire) and ran missions through valleys that he pointed out to us. He had a lot of really cool stories.
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| The guys |
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| A valley (which until fairly recently, was filled with mines) where our tour guide had fought during the Vietnam war. |
During our tour, we stopped at a lot of look out points and pagodas. My favorite stops were when we went to see the way local people and businesses produce their products. The people of Dalat seem to do very well for themselves and are very thrifty. Because they are one of the only places in Nam that grows fruits and vegetables, they take their products to Saigon or to the Mekong Delta to sell them at high prices or exchange them for rice. We saw flower farms, saw how they made coffee, rice wine, weasel coffee, black pepper, silk, tools, and brooms. Something I noticed was that the working conditions were not very bad. Especially with "slave coffee" being such a big issue in other parts of the world, it was comforting to see the coffee there was grown fairly. Of course, there could be terrible labor conditions in Vietnam, but of course they would never show us or tell us about it on a tour.. so these were just my observations about the factories we went to. The silk factory was interesting.. They had baskets full of silk worms inside their cocoons and we saw the boilers and machinery in action that they use to thread the silk. As a coffee addict, the coffee-making process was really interesting to me. They had fresh, local coffee in Dalat that grew on trees right along the road.
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| flower farm |
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| lush farms |
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| coffee bean extraction |
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| spooling silk from the cocoons onto a wheel |
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| spooling silk |
It was really interesting seeing the way the local people live and work. The seem to have good lives in Da lat. What i like the most is how resourceful and not wasteful the businesses are. They use every scrap of material for something. Once they extract the coffee beans from the shells, they use the shells as fire. They use every bit of material in the silk house. They use the silk for material (obviously) then they sell the silk worms for eating, and they dry the garbage silk to sell for pillow and blanket stuffing. In restaurants, they scrape uneaten food off of plates to feed to the pigs the next morning. They make brooms from tree branches on the side of the road. They are extremely resourceful in their manufacturing, which was really interesting to see.
