What's In A Name

Entry 15:
Our next destination was in the Central Highlands of the country, an area not well visited by tourists. In fact, it was only in the late '90s that this area was even opened to foreign visitors. Many of the tour companies do not include it on their regular itinerary. But we decided to delve deeper into Vietnam. Moreover, it was also the childhood home of our good friend Mai.

We arranged for bus travel to the region's center, a town called Buon Ma Thuot (BMT). You can imagine all the various double entendre jokes we could come up with for this name. All of them are too unsavory for this family-friendly blog.

BMT as it is known to the locals is the center of the coffee plantations throughout the highlands. Coffee growing was initiated by the French during their colonial rule over Vietnam. We thought it would be exciting to tour the area and even visit a coffee plantation. Unfortunately, since this town is so far removed from most travellers' itineraries, we found it to be difficult to manouver as almost nobody spoke English and restaurant menues were in Vietnamese only. We could not find a tour operator with any group tours. Private tours would cost more than $100 per day. We opted for a private half-day tour that would only take us to visit a couple of ethnic minority villages. The short tour was pretty good and we even got to see some goofy French tourists riding atop elephants. We were eager, though, to get out of town.