Buon Ma Thuot

We spent three awesome nights in Buon Ma Thuot. We stayed at Lys Hotel about 3.5km north of town. The town had a cinema where we watched the terrible Transformers movie but it was still awesome to have the cinema to ourselves. The morning markets were bright and smelled amazing. At night the citt was lit up like a festival. We ate street food, including BBQ your own meat. The rain made the streets muddy but it was so local it rocked.

There's a market not far from our hotel. It's alive and thumping. Neat piles of brightly coloured fruit is sold by weighing on old fashioned scaled.  Live fish swim in round plastic tubs of all sizes. Larger fish the size of small sharks are chopped in two: head and body. Pork seems to be the meat of choice, butchered with precision. For chicken meat the preferencd appears to be live birds. I just wish I had smellogram because the scent of crushed onions, garlic, chilli and spices is amazing.

I take a short walk around the muddy streets. It rained last night so the dust is now a slippery mess, even to walk on. The area around the market is the worst. It's the same rich red soil that makes this region so fertile. Everywhere plants are growing. Herbs grow in pots, vegetables in crevices and coffee grows outside the city.Read more