Easy Riding the Central Highlands

After our day adventure with the Dalat Easy-Riders, I decided to do a three day motorbike tour on my own from Dalat to Nha Trang with my guide, Mui. My first day began by taking a short cable car ride above Dalat city and to see a traditional Vietnamese temple and meditation center. This city sprawls out into fields full of vegetables and as we headed into the countryside, the hills became covered with coffee trees. Our next stop was a short stop at a small mushroom farm. These are the mushrooms that you can buy dried and when you add them to hot water they plump back up. They are grown in plastic bags and the bags are filled with a combination of lime powder and manure with a splint of bamboo in the center of the bag. The bags are strung up under a tarp and shaded from the sun. Not how I expected mushrooms to be grown at all! Next we carried on until we came to a small village where the K'Ho people live. The K'Ho are an ethnic minority group in the area and are originally from Polynesia. They are also a Matriarchal society. We sat and chatted with them for a short while. They were all very sweet and shy, yet very curious about me. Good thing Mui was there to translate our conversation! We also stopped at small family run businesses where they were making rice wine, and raising silk worms. We stopped through one more village of the M'Nong Ga people. Here they live in government built houses which are built in front or beside their traditional huts. The huts have three doors, one entrance door, one back door that they throw their garbage out of, and one door that is either open (if they have unmarried daughters available) or closed (if all of their daughters have been married off). Inside the center of the hut is a fire pit and above the fire pit is a small storage unit where they put all of their food for smoking. Even though they have gov't built houses they still use their huts to keep their culture alive. We stopped for the night at a small town near Lak Lake. For dinner we went to a family run restaurant who made catfish soup with homemade rice noodles. The husband and wife who owned the restaurant had three little girls that pulled up stools to watch me eat my soup. They had never seen a Westerner eat Vietnamese soup before. The evening ended up to be quite entertaining as the husband, with his most operatic voice, sang me the Vietnamese anthem, and a few other songs, and his youngest daughter sang me a song as well that had hand motions and everything! They made me feel very welcome in their little restaurant. When I got back to my hotel it must have been about 9:30, but I was so tired that I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

My second day in the Central Highlands started out with a visit in the village of the M'Nong Lam community. There are many rice fields that surround the area. Here the people live in long wood houses built on stilts. At night their cattle and animals sleep under the houses and when the body heat from the animals rise, it keeps the houses warm at night. Our next stop was at a brick making factory. Many Many buildings in Vietnam and actually all over Asia are built with brick. This particular brick factory was run by three families who apparently had quite a large contract and were pumping out bricks like crazy. After lunch we stopped to visit with an old veteran couple who had both served forty years in the Vietcong Army. The old man had received many medals which he was very proud of, and had met Ho Chi Minh twice in his life. They call Ho Chi Minh Uncle Ho. Mui and I chatted with the old man while his wife did funny foot shuffling exercises in their little patio area. They were very nice people and the old woman gave me many many hugs as I was leaving, I had no idea what she was saying. They seemed very happy and content despite having seen so much violence in their life. Mui also took me to see three waterfalls that day. Dray Nu was the largest of the three, and during the wet season can span 700 meters across. Men sat fishing at the top of the waterfall. Not sure how they were able to sit right on the edge like that and not get washed away! We stopped for the night in a small town and Mui took me for a goat dinner... goat cooked in three different ways. I also tried blood pudding. GROSS!

The final day of my tour started out with a traditional Vietnamese breakfast of Two bowls, one was a beef soup and the other was a noodle dish. Definitely a hearty way to start the day. We set off and stopped at a Peppercorn farm, a blacksmith shop, and wood sculpture place. As we drove towards Nha Trang city, the tall hills (which they call mountains) began to part and the South China Sea became visible. Mui dropped me off at the hotel that Megan and Arainn checked into and then we said our goodbyes. It was a really awesome trip that gave me a little taste of what Vietnam is really like outside the big city tourist centers.

B