The Real Viet Nam?

Back from the Central Highlands - it’s hard to know where to start! Tin, our tour guide, said that he wanted to show us the real Viet Nam, away from the tourist trail along the coast. And he definitely succeeded in his goal of teaching us about the other side of Vietnamese life.

Elephant Falls

For three days, we drove through fields of both wet and dry rice, coffee, cassava, bananas, corn, flowers, and almost any tropical fruit you can think of. We stayed in hotels mostly frequented by Vietnamese travelers, ate pho bo (beef noodle soup) and boiled corn at roadside restaurants, had coffee with Tin’s cousin, and grilled chicken dinner at the house of a local family.

A teeny resident of a minority village

A tapped rubber tree

Sunset with fish farms in the background

Traditional M'nong longhouse 

As we drove through the incredibly green mountains, we stopped often for pictures, and for Tin to explain Vietnamese history and culture, coffee growing and roasting, rice growing,"happy water" (rice wine) distillation, rubber production, and information about the minority tribes, who were the original inhabitants of the Central Highlands. One of our longer stops was at a small silk-making factory; we were able to see examples of the whole process - from winding the silk strands off the cocoon to weaving the silk thread into the intricate patterns of the fabric.

Silk worm cocoons

And the coffee....mmmmm......coffee. Every place we stopped seemed to have better coffee than the last. Apparently, Viet Nam is the second largest coffee exporter in the world, and the coffee grows in the Central Highlands, some of the plants so high on a hillside to be almost vertical. According to Tin, what makes Vietnamese coffee unique is the roasting process. After the coffee berries’ two skins are removed (the obvious outer layer and a thinner layer right around the bean), the green beans are roasted over charcoal, with inclusions of butter, rum, and a bit of fish sauce (!?). Anyway, the result is wonderful. Another uniquely Vietnamese coffee is ca phe chon, or weasel coffee. Why weasel? Well, first, you feed the coffee berries to a weasel. The weasel then digests the berry part, and the bean...uh....passes through. You collect the result, wash it off, and then continue with the normal roasting process. This is the most expensive type of coffee available (other countries do a similar process with civet cats). And no, I’m not sure who first thought that maybe this would be a good idea.

Coffee berry-eating weasels, strangely relaxed

Along with the coffee, one of my favourite things about Viet Nam is the fruit. One of my highlights from the highlands was our visit to a local market. A REAL local market, not the big city markets which are set up for tourist visits. No iPho t-shirts here! But, if you wanted dishes, tools, shovels, shoes, and clothes, this was the place to go. This is also where the local people buy all their food, including fresh vegetables and herbs, and very fresh meat and fish (some of it not quite dead yet kind of fresh, like).  We went to one of the fruit sellers, sat down on the ground on a tarp, and were given longans, tangerines, and dragon fruit to try, all beautifully fresh and sweet.

Then Tin asked, “Who wants durian?” Now, durian smells. In Canada, it’s sold frozen, partially for preservation during transport, and partially to prevent undue retching in the produce aisle. My friend’s mother likes durian, and the rest of the family makes her eat it in the garage. You cannot bring fresh durian on planes or into hotel rooms in Viet Nam. So, of course, I said, “I’ll try some!” It was...ok. Not fruity at all. To me, it tasted like roasted onions and garlic. In fact, I thought it would go well with a nice coconut curry sauce and maybe some shrimp.

The last part of our journey took us from the Central Highlands to Nha Trang. All of the Central Highlands saw heavy fighting during the American War; one area in particular, the Phoenix Pass, was heavily bombed with Agent Orange. During the American War, the North Vietnamese were able to camouflage themselves enough so that American planes could not detect them moving through the jungle. US command reasoned that with no jungle, the enemy could be easily seen, and with no crops, the enemy could not be fed. Between 1961-71, over 75 million litres of Agent Orange, a dioxin-based defoliant, was sprayed in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. The effect on the land was devastating, as was the effect on the people. What had been lush jungle became a barren desert, and over 40,000 people were killed outright as a result of the bombings.

After 40 years, the soil is still too contaminated to support plant growth

40 years later, the soil is still contaminated. In parts of Phoenix Pass, nothing grows. In other parts, only one type of tree grows - a type that draws the contaminants out of the ground. Eventually, the contaminants kill the tree, but the local people rejoice, believing that at least some of the poison is gone from the land. Approximately 3 million Vietnamese people have health problems, ranging from cancers, skin diseases, and physical and intellectual disabilities. Children whose grandparents were exposed to Agent Orange are being born with birth defects.

This is what the area should look like

What makes a horrific situation even worse is that there was research available in the early 1960’s, warning against the use of dioxin as a defoliant because of its effect on humans and the environment. The US chose to use the chemical anyway. Furthermore, the US government has admitted that Agent Orange adversely affected US war veterans, and has provided some compensation to them, but refuses to acknowledge the effects on Viet Nam and its people. The government and chemical companies involved (Dow and Monsanto) continue claim that the other should be responsible for any compensation. The US government has begun to pay for the cleanup of former US bases, but experts claim that the payment offered is in no way adequate for a proper job to be done. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese people get on with life as best they can and continue to advocate for acknowledgement and compensation.

At the end of our journey was Nha Trang, a long-time beach city and more recent resort centre. It was like entering a different world, or waking up from a dream. Which Viet Nam was the dream?

School uniforms also double as swimwear!