Motorbikes!

(Text by Rachel, pictures by Ian Darr)

After our nice jaunt to Cambodia, we caught a bus up to the highlands to escape the heat and humidity in HCMC. The driver certainly was a member of "the nation's kamikaze bus fleet," as Lonely Planet so accurately described them, but the ride itself was pleasant, aided by the consumption of the miniature bananas and tiny tangerines that were sold all over Vietnam. In Dalat we stayed at the Pink House Hotel, where we were greeted by a small, effusive man who greeted us by name and hummed "Here Comes the Bride" as he led us up the stairs to our fourth floor rooms. (I don't know how this happened, but we ended up staying on the fourth or fifth floor of just about every hotel we stayed at. This meant that we hauled all of our stuff up and down an average of three flights of stairs per day.)

Figure 1.  Shit-eating grin

The owner of the hotel also offered us a personal motorbike tour around Dalat, and after a brief consultation we took him up on the offer. The next morning we set off with our guide (the owner's sister) and four motorbikes for the five of us. This arrangement turned out to be great because we always had one person chilling on the back of a bike and taking photos.

KID DOESN'T GO FAST

FOREST GOES FAST

The great thing about motorbikes is that you always feel like a badass riding one. But then somebody pulls up next to you and you realize that no, you don't look like a badass. You just look slightly ridiculous.

We had a full day on our bikes, roaming across the mountains of the highlands. Dalat was originally a place where the wealthy went to retreat from the heat of the lowlands, and it cretainly retains that feel.

Righto.

Our tour focused a lot on how things were made: we stopped in coffee orchards and rice fields on the side of the road, and our first stop of the morning was at a cricket farm. In Vietnam they eat fried crickets as a treat, and they raise them in famrs where they are fed clean leaves to ensure that there is nothing nasty in their insides. Our guide took great pleasure in offering us live crickets, which she ate when we declined. Then she sat us down at a table with a bowl of fried crickets and sauce, and we slowly peer pressured each other into eating them. Forest surprised everybody by being the first one to eat!

Breakfast of champions

Crickets turn out to be crunchy and tasty, but the legs get stuck in your teeth. We decided they were too much work and moved on to our next stop: a silk factory.

Silk production is kind of wild. The cocoons are unwound just by putting them in hot water and using chopsticks to grab bunches of thread when they loosen. Those threads are draped over spinning pices which miraculously grab them and turn the individual pieces of silk into silk thread for weaving. The spinning of the machine keeps the cocoons moving and causes them to unwind even further.

Cocoons

Waiting to be unspun

After the thread is made it is woven into patterned cloth. This is done with paper punch cards, of all things! The punch cards tell the machine which threads to raise and which threads to lower for a given line of weave. Pictures speak louder than words here:

Paper punch cards for patterns o.O

"CNC" loom

After weaving the cloth is dyed. We asked how the cloth can be two colors when it is dyed in one cloth, but this is apparently a trade secret. So we looked around their shop for a bit, then moved on with our ride.

Our guide pulled a fruit off a tree and used it as lipstick.

Drying coffee beans

One of the other very cools stops was at a minority village. Vietnam has many hill tribes that are not related to the main family of the Vietnamese people. Vietnam has not dealt with its minorities as well as New Zealand has: when we visited we sat in a ramshackle wooden hut that was canted slightly to one side, and all of the women we talked to were very small. On the other hand, this does not appear to be through a complete lack of effort. Our guide said that the children all go to school and learn Vietnamese as well as their own languages (each tribe has a different language, unrelated to Vietnamese). There are houses built and paid for by the government as well as a nearby hospital. Our guide could speak the language of the people we were speaking to, so she acted as an interpreter for them. They said that they do not want to go to the hospital for care or to give birth because they did not like being asked to take their clothes off for the doctors to look at them, especially if the doctors were male.

Previously we learned how silk was made; this time we learned about cotton clothes that the women of that tribe wore. They showed us the whole process, from flattening the cotton fluffs and extracting the seeds to spinning it into thread and then weaving it. The process was similar to that for silk, but at the same time very different: the silk was being made in a factory setting, with rows of women tending the machines. The cotton was worked by hand with wooden instruments and also woven by hand, not with machines. In both cases the end result was beautiful.

Cotton thread being spun

Rice

We made a few other stops at some tourist places and a mushroom farm, then spent the rest of the day driving and made it back in the evening just as it was starting to rain. Riding motorbikes was really fun. They're light and easy to use, and they make you feel like you're going really fast. Riding them on mountain roads was an added challenge, since the road with can be derived as follows:

Take one truck. Have it pass another truck with less than a foot between them, honking all the way. Add a bend in the road and a motorbike almost off the road on either side, then throw in a bike for good measure. You have to keep your eyes and ears open at all times. All in all, it was great fun.

The last thing we did in Dalat before catching a bus out of the highlands was visit the Dalat Crazy House.

I always knew there was a place for people like me!

Forest found a linking book !

Forest says: In my opinion, it was one of the most inspirational bits of architecture I have ever seen. Even with the construction being quite low tech (chicken wire, rebar, bricks, and cement) it turns out crazy. All loads of crazy artsy touches everywhere, be it neato wood round floors, stairs and ladders looping every which where - in general, looking like the Myst games.

Easier than Riven