I’m on a bike tour! These are popular ways to tour around here. Your Guide has. Bike and you tailor an itinerary to suit yourself and off you go.
My guide/driver is Hero, about late 40s. He has a family in Da Lat and this is his business now. He has the business with one of his many brothers. He is part of a ‘football team’ sized family. Three brothers fought in the war. Two were injured and one killed.
The bike is not big but we, and our luggage, fit comfortably. It’s a great way to look around. You get perfect viewing, wind in your face, and all the information you want with a local knowledge of where to go. We escape Da Lat via a Buddhist temple, then a flower farm where we drop in and see them preparing the morning shipment for Saigon. Then onto a silkworm factory. What an amazing place this is. Silk worms create silken cacoons that are harvested via a complicated mechanical process. The naked cacoons with unborn moths are then sold off for food. The silk is also woven in this same factory. Beautiful stuff. And all the staff are beautiful young women – who is on the selection panel.
We make our way up into the hills and coffee country. Every inch of hill is coffee trees. The French introduced this industry and now the Vietnamese farmers are making the world, including me, happy. We drop into a farm where there produce a special brand of coffee. The harvest the seed from the dung of weasels (I think they are civets rather than weasels). The civets are housed in cages and are feed the fruit. A breeding pair keep the civet stock in supply. They also make a powerful rice whiskey here. One shot straight from the var gave me a serious ‘glow’!
We pass through a small village that is home to a hill tribe. They are coffee farmers now and every house has coffee seed drying in their yards and on the streets. It’s harvesting time. Village life is fairly under privileged and schools seem rare. The people here do look different to elsewhere with broader faces and darker skin. And they are quite short in stature.
We finish the day at a lake resort.
angusmccoll 