I decided to book a three day trip that would take me from Dalat to Nha Trang - a four hour bus ride, if you use the highway and look neither left nor right. Since looking left and right, and stopping often, was the whole purpose of the trip, expanding it to three days seemed like a good idea.
This is my driver Hiep and me in front of the office, seconds before we left:
The first stop was the Truc Lam temple, a Buddhist pagoda just outside of Dalat. The setting away from the business of the city in a pine forest made the temple very calm and peaceful.
There were very few tourists visiting the temple, and the only sound was a harmony of birdsong, wind chimes, and the occasional gong struck by a monk. If there hadn't been an Easy Rider and a day full of adventures waiting for me, I would have stayed for a few hours just to soak up the atmosphere.
But, alas, adventure called, and soon we were in a new village. The village was nicknamed "mushroom village" because almost everybody there farms mushrooms - cloud ear fungus, to be precise. The fungi are grown on bags filled with sawdust inside dark tents, and laid out to dry after the harvest. This way, the mushrooms keep for a long time. To use dried mushrooms for cooking, all you have to do is soak them in water for a little bit, and they're as good as new again.
On the road, we passed several communities harvesting rice - in this part of Vietnam, there are three rice harvests per year, and apparently right now is one of them. I love the yellow-green color of rice fields just before the harvest:
In one of the towns we passed, I saw a huge monument and asked my driver to stop and explain. For him, the monument was nothing special, because there are similar ones in just about every town in Vietnam. They're war hero monuments, of course, commemorating the losses during the Vietnam war and the final victory. I was a bit mystified by the closed gates, but apparently they are intended to keep water buffaloes (and youths) from coming in and abusing the site.
The views all along the road continued to be spectacular. Vietnam really is a gorgeous country!
At one point, we saw a beautiful rainbow resting in the fog on the mountainside. My guide explained that rainbows are the paths where people who are reborn as gods walk up to heaven after their burial - making a rainbow a very special and happy sight.
Rice wasn't the only crop ready for harvesting: in all the villages lining our road, on all available surfaces around the houses and on the side of the road, families had spread out their coffee harvest to dry. Where the big plantations in South America use machinery, family farms in Vietnam do everything manually - or, in this case, let the sun do the work for them.
To my delight, coffee was not only ready for harvesting, but some of the plants were already blooming again. I had never seen coffee flowers before. Beautiful!
Our last stop before we reached our hotel for the night was a bridge crossing an artificial lake that was created by a dam for hydroelectric power generation. The lake is home to a few families living in floating houses. The families originally came from the Mekong Delta - that's why there were used to living on the water - and they came to the highlands because the living conditions on the new lake seemed better.
Although they have houses and plenty of fish, they lack electricity and access to schools. Apropos schools: education in Vietnam is expensive. Every single school costs money - even primary schools. So if a family doesn't have money, the children have no chance whatsoever to get even the most basic education. This is something I definitely wouldn't have expected to find in a country that calls itself a Socialist Republic.
