Coffee

(PICTURE: This cup of extremely strong drip coffee had no press, unlike everywhere else in Vietnam.)

For most of our drive through the Central Highlands, we were surrounded by two crops: rubber and coffee. I was never a coffee drinker before I came to Vietnam, but became converted pretty quickly over here. I'm not a caffeine addict by any means but simply love the taste of an iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

The most famous place in Vietnam for coffee is Buon Me Thuot. When you're there, it's pretty obvious why. Surrounding the city are fields upon fields of coffee. Heck, everyone we met seemed to have at least a couple of their own hectares of coffee. In the city are more coffee shops than anywhere else in Vietnam. Coffee has done well for BMT because it's pretty obvious that it's a very rich city.

That said, the best cup of coffee we had was a few hours north of BMT in Kon Tum. In Kon Tum we had a very strong drip coffee that had no press (picture above). Usually inside the top part of the coffee dripper is a press you can push to make the water go through the grinds faster. Here, they just had double the amount of grinds and nothing to rush the process. The coffee was great and very strong.


(PICTURE: There were coffee farms everywhere and even just random bushes wherever you would stop. This one was at a roadside rest stop we drank coconuts at.)