Thursday, March 29, 2018

Weasel coffee and Montaignard people

Dalat is a lovely city in the mountains of central Vietnam. 5000 feet in altitude. Lovely cool weather. It was founded by the French as a getaway city. Full of French style villas, now a destination for Vietnamese tourist. Not many foreign visitors. 
There are 40,000 plus green houses where the grow flowers to ship all over Asia. They are all around the city. 

We went out of Dalat up into the mountains where they grow coffee. Vietnam is the second largest exporter of coffee after Brazil and before Columbia. 
We visited a coffee plantation where the have weasel that eat the beans and poop out the berries.

They have to send the poop to the factory intact to insure it is the real thing. The factory rinses the berries in the local red wine removes the husk and roasts it. We got to have a sample of the coffee and had an opportunity to purchase 100 grams for $20.00 us. Too bad I am not a coffee drinker, I did not see God. 

Coffee flowers smell really sweet, like jasmine.

We also received special permission from the government to visit a k'ho village, one of several Montainard tribes. They have been given housing, water and electricity by the government in an effort to curb their slash and burn farming practices. They have large families and it is a matriarchal society. Women pay a dowry to their husband family and the husband lives with his wife's family.
We visited the local school the K'ho people are not real big on sending their kids to school. The government provides free schooling in an effort to get more children to attend. They have a Vietnamese teacher who teaches the children to speak Vietnamese in addition to the K'ho language. 

We visited with the headman of the village and his wife who was weaving on a traditional back strap loom.


The village is Catholic and has a pole outside the church which is a nod to their animist roots, they treat it like a Christmas tree.

The bus was not able to negotiate the dirt road so we went up in a tractor trailer.

A really bumpy ride











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