Terrain, Grains & Automa-weasels

Following our final night in Dalat we had booked to go on a cycling trip out of the city to visit a few attractions. Expecting to be once again part of a tour-group and Mark having self-administered his necessary Valium dosage, we were pleased to discover the tour would be just the three of us and a guide.

We began by cycling through the busy Dalat streets at peak rush-hour then climbing a hill reminiscent of that which killed our Kia a couple of days back. I made it about a quarter of the way up before dismounting and pushing, Woody a little over halfway and Mark made it to the top, but injured himself in the process.

Slightly mitigating my underperformance were issues I was having with the gears. Two-thirds of the theoretically-available gears were inoperable, but the range available weren't shifting as expected. The problem was one of communication; there were two triggers and the guide had advised that the upper trigger was 'down' and the lower trigger was 'up'. So when the terrain began sloping upwards I logically sought to move down to a lower gear so pressed the upper trigger, but this seemed to be moving the gear up, much as I'd do when going down, and which should have been linked to the lower trigger. Put simply, going up I flicked up but this moved up instead of down so I should have been pressing down to go down so I could efficiently go up. I later understood the guide had meant the upper trigger was for 'downhill' and the lower for 'uphill', and cycled far better from then onwards. The brakes were also crap.

Our first stop was a coffee plantation, where we were shown the different varieties of plant, invited to sample the end-product and shown the cages where they keep the weasels that enable them to produce Vietnam Weasel Coffee, also known sometimes as Shit Coffee, albeit affectionately.

Now I'm going to go on record here and say I'm not a fan of the weasel-coffee thing; keeping them in small cages and feeding them a coffee diet to produce product. It's treating them like machines; beans go in, shit comes out, harvest that shit for beans then sell. I don't care if they like the coffee - I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre that said, and I'm paraphrasing, "hell is being locked forever in a room with unlimited coffee". It's the veal argument - we already have perfectly good coffee so why do we need to produce an incrementally 'better' version by torturing animals. Woody said he'd happily waterboard a cow for a more succulent steak, so I guess people are different.

Now, I want to make it absolutely clear, it was purely for these ethical concerns that I wasn't keen on ingesting something that had passed through a weasel's digestive tract. But the other coffee was delicious (bought some to bring home) and the view of the plantation from the balcony we drank on was incredible. Woody had a 7up.

Incidentally, and not at all to help validate a convenient rhyme, a granule of coffee can be accurately described as 'grain'.

After a further 30k ride we reached Elephant Falls, a large and beautiful waterfall that can be reached via a precarious scramble over slippery rock. There was also a cave, which got Mark wet. Our guide waited until the climb back up to tell us about the volume of fatalities that occur there; I'm not surprised.

Also, in the world of wood-joints, 'waterfall' is a type of grain where the wood grain carries from one plane (horizontal) to the next plane (vertical).

We next had lunch in the company of some friendly dogs, which I fed and they became even friendlier. We had rice, which is a cereal grain. This was the end of the line for our bikes, the half-broken contraptions taken from us so they could be live to be half-broken another day.

Afterward we a pagoda, which our guide couldn't enter for religious reasons. There was a big, happy, fat Buddha statue that I'd doubt we'd permit in the UK lest it promote an unhealthy body-image aspiration that would further strain our under-pressure NHS. Mind, these are unlikely photo-realistic depictions and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Next stop was a silk factory, where they produced silk from worm to cloth. We were offered a silk worm to eat and Mark and Woody both took-up the offer. Now, I want to make it absolutely clear, it was only because I was full from lunch and not the nasty wrigglesome look of the things why I didn't try one... Oh, also any woven fabric has a grain line, this being the longwise threads which are stretched on the loom, forming a warp, as opposed to the weft threads woven across it.

Our final stop was a small farm where the owners kept a variety of animals; turkeys, crocodiles, pheasants, guinea pigs, regular pigs, porcupines but mostly, volumetrically speaking, crickets. They also made rice wine, from the already-established grain, which we were offered to try with a side of crickets. Now, I want to make it absolutely clear, that it was only my fondness for the film Pinocchio as a child and particularly my affection for the Jiminy Cricket character that I refused to partake. I had the wine though. Mark and Woody had the lot.

We headed back for a rest, occasionally experiencing the cool breeze from our single oscillating fan. In fairness, Dalat has been broadly cooler than Nha Trang so the absence of a/c hadn't been as bothersome as I expected. We later returned to the same "best street ever" per Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor and/or the people running the places on the street. Woody and I had a simply delectable coconut curry and Mark had mango chicken which was nice but not as nice as the coconut curry. Honestly the best coconut curry I've ever had. I spilled my beer and it was this whole thing.Read more