Scenic Da Lat

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Pongour Waterfall

A huge water snail

These laid bright pink egg sacks on rocks above the waterline. At first we thought people had been leaving their chewing gum in weird places.

Elephant waterfall

Coffee berries

These are a variety called Cherry which fruit much later than all the others. Most trees had been harvested several months ago and were already flowering.

Coffee trees

Happy Buddha

Lady Buddha

The landscape felt very different to everywhere else we've been in Asia so far.

The highlight of Chicken Village

There are greenhouses everywhere growing flowers.

Today we did a tour around the Da Lat countryside. It was supposed to be a group tour but we were the only ones who were doing it so it turned out to be a cheap private tour.

Da Lat is much more temperate than most of Vietnam and produces huge amounts of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, which we saw a lot of on the tour.

A lot of coffee is grown here and we visited a place that produces the special/infamous civet or weasel coffee. This coffee is made by feeding the fresh coffee berries to palm civets (large weasel like creatures) which then soften the beans as they digest them. The dung is then collected and processed as usual. It sounds quite gross but we compared a bunch of different roasted beans and the civet produced ones definitely had a much more intense aroma.