Rubber trees, once grown, can be used to harvest rubber from for fifty to sixty years. All you have to do is make a new diagonal cut in the bark every day and attach a small cup to gather the liquid rubber flowing from the tree. This is rubber fresh from the tree:
Another stop we made was at a family that was just processing their cocoa harvest. Cocoa is a relatively recent addition to Vietnam's flora, but more and more farmers are growing it since it yields good money. The processing, like most things in Vietnam, was entirely manual: cracking up the cocoa fruits, extracting the beans and putting them into sacks, and later spreading them out to dry in the front yard. I loved the colors in the pile of cocoa fruits: even though the fruits were all ripe, they had various shades of green, yellow and red.
A wood carving workshop was our next stop. The family there uses root wood to carve statues of all kinds, but mostly happy Buddha statues. A statue that takes about two days of work can be sold for three million dong (about 150 US dollars), which is quite expensive for Vietnam, and therefore a good income for the family.
Later, we rode through an area with grassy hills. While the view looks nice and peaceful enough, the reality is not: these were hills that the US sprayed with Agent Orange during the war. Even today, trees that have deep roots cannot grow there; only plants with shallow roots survive. This is just another piece of evidence of how badly Agent Orange has polluted Vietnam.
Just before we rode into the tourist trap of Nha Trang at the end of the day, we stopped at this quaint little fishing village. The high-rise hotels that make up much of Nha Trang seem a world away in this village with its fleet of fishing boats waiting just off the coast.
