Dalat- Flowers, Coffee and Hill People

Dalat is about 5000 feet elevation and is said by the locals to have 4 seasons each day. We went to one of the thousands of greenhouses where flowers are grown for market in Vietnam and other countries mostly in Asia.

Our logical guide explained how to harvest the
Gerber daisy and we each leaned how to do it so that the next bloom uses the same area in the root to send up a new bloom.

Roses tend to be a substantial earner because a single plant will last 19 years. And for certain holidays the grower can depend on selling all his roses. Valentines Day is one of those holidays.

Each rose has an especially long stem because they get more at the market.

From the greenhouses we went to a village which is supported in part by the nonprofit that is connected to OAT. This is an example of a village of hill people forced to move out of the jungle because they used slash-and-burn techniques for their agriculture which when populations increase tends to degrade the environment. However on our way to the village we past two fires in the trees which were probably started by local people.

This is the mayor’s wife weaving of the wraps used for ttto

The weaver took a break to have a smoke. She has been smoking since she was 13. She is 86 years old now. I asked if she was smoking tobacco and when asked she said yes. But I noticed Ganga in the air.

Lots of kids in the area. I will tell a joke our guide told us about the village

Our next stop was a weasel farm. Weasel coffee is considered a great delicacy. In other cultures it could calledbe called covet

Coffee beans with ripe red coffee beans in the bowl. Weasels love the red berries and do not touch the unripe berries. The consume the ripe berries and eat the outside shell leaving the two beans inside which tend to be bitter. They pass the beans through their system and now we have the beginning of weasel coffee. Way more expensive than normal. We got to taste the product which of course had be roasted. We had iced Vietnamese coffee with ice cubes condensed milk and the weasel coffee. Not bad.

When we got back to town some of us went around the corner from our hotel to see the “crazy house”. The photo above was taken through one of the torturous concrete fake vines that cascade through the place. You can rent a room here for a price from US 30 to 80 dollars. The architect owner lived in an adjacent part of the compound. I