Less than a month before we left Missouri, Liban’s travel bug flared up, and he suggested we spend the majority of December traveling in Southeast Asia somewhere. Who was I to say no? By the next day we had plane tickets.
At that point we really had no clue as to what Vietnam offered, so we decided 10-11 days was good enough. (It’s not.) Upon actually researching the country, we quickly realized that although Vietnam is a smaller country, it’s very long and the geography makes traveling by train and bus quite time-consuming. So, our “things to do” list was halved for sanity’s sake.
Unlike all of my previous travels, I didn’t really have expectations for Vietnam. I had places I’d wanted to see, but it’s not a country often depicted in fine art, books, or movies--unless it’s war-related. As a result, the image in my mind was limited to “jungle, war, beach, tropical weather, Asian city chaos, pho’.”
I can happily say that it blew away whatever measly expectations I did have, and I loved our time there.
We started in Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon) and met up with a university student who offers free city tours in exchange for meeting foreigners and improving her English. Liban’s favorite part of traveling is food, and she took us to some great local restaurants which let us experiment with confidence. We tried snails cooked in a coconut sauce; the downside of this dish being that you suck the snails out of the shells rather than pull them out with fingers or a fork. I kept hearing Mom’s voice in the back of my mind telling me not to slurp my food, Liban got scolded by a waiter for trying to use a fork, and I ended up placing my thumb at the back hole of the shell to create more suction pressure. . . consequently giving my thumb a hickey.
One thing that surprised me the most throughout our entire trip, but especially in Saigon, is the French influence from its colonial days. Some of the old French buildings have been kept up to such an extent we thought they were newly built, others are noticeably aging homes with balconies lining the rivers, and yet others have a unique combination of French and Vietnamese styles. (I realize that most every country was once a European colony, but India has set my sights awfully low in the maintenance of old structures and aesthetics as a whole, so I find this worth mentioning.)
A small city in the mountains, Dalat was our next stop and our only stop said to be “off the main backpacking trail.” But whoever wrote that either lied or started a whole new trend because the number of westerners proved otherwise. We had a couple of guys give us a motorcycle tour around the mountains and to a waterfall, all of which were beautiful--although the pouring rain made it for a very chilly afternoon. We also visited a silk factory where mass amounts of cocoons are attached to and unraveled by machines. Naturally, this factory also sautees the silk worms to ensure they don’t go to waste, so we each ate one but turned down second helpings!
At a rice wine factory, we tried a couple drops of a rice wine with 65% alcohol content. (If you need help imagining that taste, just imagine your mouth puckering up yet being on fire for 5 minutes.) Snake wine is another popular thing in the area, and seeing the cobra with its hood up, ready to strike--inside the massive Mason jar of wine--was definitely cool. They also had jars of smaller snakes and even one of a Komodo dragon. Snakes are also a delicacy here, so we saw a rather large, caged boa constrictor whose future is likely the main dish at someone’s party. I wanted to try the meat, but after looking at the prices on the menus, we decided chicken was more affordable!
Dalat’s main other attraction was its nearby coffee farms. The farms alone are beautiful because it’s built on the mountainside, but these farms are particularly unique because they use weasels for processing the coffee. My basic understanding is that the farmers collect the red coffee berries and feed it to their weasels, which are kept in cages surrounded by fairly aggressive guard dogs. The weasels digest the berry part but not the bean, and the beans are excreted before being cleaned, roasted, packaged, and sold in stores. I have no idea how someone looked at a weasel’s excrement and said, “hey! Let’s boil this and drink it!” but someone, somewhere apparently did, and now weasels are worth a heck of a lot of money in Vietnam. 
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