The Road to Da Lat

It did not take long for me to deviate from my initial travel plans. My first destination after Saigon was shifted to Da Lat after receiving the suggestion from nearly everyone I spoke to in VN.

Da Lat is a seven hour bus trip from Saigon. I got myself a seat on a sleeper bus and it was actually a really nice trip.

Vietnam's top three exports are rice, coffee, and rubber. And they are in the top three global producers for all of those things. Agriculture on the way to Da Lat had a definite focus on coffee. We passed a few small gardens, and there are banana trees growing everywhere, but I've never seen so much coffee. It seemed like every other house had a tarp laid out in front to dry coffee cherries.

There was a lot of kicking the cherries around and raking them out, but it seemed like just about everyone was producing some quantity of coffee.

The other thing that caught my eye along the way is that as we got close to Da Lat there seemed to be a lot of burning going on in the forest. We passed a number of these small fires on the way, one of them close enough that the smoke was drifting across the road.