DaLat, Vietnam

Da Lat is a vibrant city with a very lively night market that remains quite traditional, and is still mostly meant to supply the locals. One can find very few souvenir stands, which I take as a good sign. As any self respecting night market, there is lots of street food offers. I tried sweet potatoe bread and a grilled snack which is a hybrid between a pizza and a burrito, but Vietnamese style.
The city revolves around a lake. By the lake there is a high end golf course and a sort of flower botanical garden. Da Lat is also home to a prominent University with extensive campus.

As for night life, Da Lat offers the unique "100 roof" bar. This bar is literally a maze inside. I was happy to be in the company of people with a better sense of orientation than mine. Otherwise I would have never found my way out.

To go see Da Lat's attractions in the short time I had available, I hired a tour for 25 USD. First, they took us to a flower farm. Da Lat is known for its specialized crops. Unlike the rest of the country, which mostly lives off of rice crops, Da Lat does flowers, silk and coffee.

Flowers are hand wrapped individually. The women who do this job, get paid 10 dollars a day.
Coffee crops are more or less all over the mountains. We went to a typical house of a family from the Kha people. Kha are 1 of the 53 minorities in Vietnam, with Vietnamese being 86% of the population. Kha people have their own spoken language, although their lifestyle didn't seem so different to me from the lifestyle of monk people in the north. As is the case for most of Vietnam, Kha people function as a matriarchal society in which women own the coffee plantation, and chose their husbands.
I also didn't know that Vietnam is the second largest world producer of coffee, after Brasil and before Colombia. Coffee stays in small pots in the kha people's homes until it is 2 years old. Then it is transferred to the fields where after a few years, it is hand picked from November to January. Vietnamese grow three coffee varieties: Robusta, Arabica and Mocha, in ascending quality.
Old coffee trees are used for low quality silk production. Higher quality silk is extracted from
Silk worms, while the worm itself is sent to the night markets to be eaten. People working at rhe silk farms get paid 15 dollars a day and there is no age minimum to start working.

Da Lat is also home to weasel Coffee, aka coffee from beans pooped by civets, considered the best coffee in the world. Civets (aka Lawaki) are fed the red beans of all the varieties separately to make Lawaki Arabica, robusta and moka respectively, during the coffee harvest months. They consume aprox 200 g coffee beans per day. I paid 60000 dong for a cup of lawaki moka coffee (3 USD). And I have to say, I don't know what all the fuzz is about. Maybe I'm missing something, but the quality of that coffee is nothing special. And, the production of this coffee supports the horrible exploitation of civets, which live in cages way too small for them.
We also visited a cricket farm and exotic animals farms, where everything is raised to be eaten. I did not like this part of the tour much at all.
Finally, we went to the big happy buddah temple and the elephant waterfalls. Both beautiful sightseeing.Read more