Countryside Tour

So, the weather hasn't been great for my time in Da Lat. I booked a trek to three local peaks, but everyone else on the tour cancelled and the guide talked me into a countryside tour on the back of a motorcycle instead. I think I was lucky, because it ended up just being me and the guide, Tam.

The first stop on the countryside tour is a cricket farm. They're grown here for food. Apparently the owner of this farm brought his first batch of eggs up from Cu Chi. I suppose they have good crickets there. They are grown in these big open pits full of corn husks. There's a lip of glazed tile on the pit to keep them from crawling out. Tam informed me that during the day crickets don't jump. So, they can leave them open during the daytime, only needing to cover them at night.

The obvious next step in the tour is for us to eat some crickets. When we walked out there was a small, covered plate on the table. Tam had me close my eyes and smell it first--it smelled quite good. Next he made me promise that if we don't finish it, we don't leave. Then he lifted the cover to reveal a fairly sizeable pile. They weren't bad. They were fried in oil and served with a sweet chili sauce that is pretty pervasive here as a condiment. There's something mental to be overcome every time you put one in your mouth, but the taste was pleasant.

The next stop on the tour is at a place that makes rice wine and what they call Weasel Coffee. You've probably heard of this as Civet Coffee. For those of you unfamiliar, what makes this coffee special is that the coffee cherries are consumed and digested by a civet. According to Tam, it is also referred to as shit coffee. The beans are collected from the excrement and roasted normally. It has a different smell and taste to it. The coffee they serve here is very strong, but this was very smooth--not bitter at all. It was quite good. Here's a picture of some civet droppings.

As I mentioned, they also make rice wine here. The process was shown to me, and wine is really a misnomer. Rice whiskey would be more appropriate. Seeing their still was neat. It involved a small pond built into the side of the house. I had a couple small shots of the finished product, which was excellent. Tam kept referring to it as sixty five degrees, which I didn't understand until he set some on fire.



This finished rice wine often receives some pretty weird additions. The most basic is what Tam referred to as root medicine. I have no idea what it really is, but some sort of root. Below is a picture of a jug of wine with a bunch of venomous snakes and geckos in it. Cobra wine is popular. The weirdest one, in my opinion, had a handful of lizards and a couple crows in it. I'm not sure why, but the crow really stood out to me. Tam told me that the rural folks are very fond of this stuff. They have a couple cups to make them strong and put them to bed when the day is done.

The next stop was the Linh An Pagoda on the edge of Elephant falls. The pagoda was beautiful. There was an indoor area with a number of altars and statues, but I really enjoyed the gardens. There were several more altars out there.

In tour brochures this place is always referred to as the Happy Buddha in reference to this giant turquoise statue. He does look pretty happy. Apparently I was supposed to rub his belly to bring myself happiness. Oops.

Right next door are the Elephant falls. There is a rock at the bottom that looks something like an elephant. As the story goes, there was a baby elephant who wandered off from his mother and got lost. He was feeling quite thirsty and tried to lean in for a little drink but was pulled over the edge, making the rock at the bottom. His mother looked for him for ages. When she finally found him, she couldn't stop crying, and that is what feeds the falls. It's pretty morbid, and the timeline is a little circular, but that's the story. Also, Tam insisted that I stand in the spray for a photo.

The final stop on the tour is a silk factory. A lot of what I learned here passed right between my ears, but there are a couple details I remember. The silk worms that they use these days come from China, because the local species take about four times as long to produce the cocoon. These guys on my hand are very young. If I remember correctly, he said it took about four weeks for them to reach the size of your little finger, which is when they spin their cocoon.

They set them up on racks to spin their cocoons. Once they are spun, the cocoons are thrown into hot water, which allows the silk to come off as a single strand rather than a mess of fuzz. Each one of those wheels of thread is attached to a single cocoon. A single cocoon produces somewhere around five hundred meters of thread.

There were a handful of weaving machines in the factory as well. These can each only produce about five meters of cloth a day. Fast for weaving, but not particularly fast.

The visit to the silk factory also involved eating bugs. Once all the silk of the cocoon is removed, the chrysalis is mostly unnecessary. Some are certainly kept to produce the flightless moths that lay the eggs for the next batch, but most are extra. The silk worm chrysalis was very mushy. They had cooked it up with lemongrass, and that was the only flavor (Tam insisted that they taste like peanuts). I don't know if it was that I had already eaten a big pile of insects or that these really don't resemble a bug, but despite their mushiness, it required a lot less focus to get through them. I also only ate two, rather than forty.

The tour ended with a proper lunch of pho at a little roadside restaurant. I'm writing this on my last day in Da Lat, and I never got to do that trek, but this was also a lot of fun.