Vietnam's coffee capital — highland robusta, elephant culture, and Ede longhouses
Buôn Ma Thuột (pronounced approximately 'Boon Ma Tewut') is the capital of Dak Lak province and the undisputed coffee capital of Vietnam — which means it is also the coffee capital of Southeast Asia, since Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee exporter and Dak Lak grows the most beans. The Central Highlands city sits at 500m elevation surrounded by red basaltic soil plantations of robusta coffee, and the cafe culture here is unlike anywhere else in Vietnam: strong, sweet, impossibly cheap, consumed in vast quantities. The region is home to the Ede, M'nong, and other indigenous highland…
The Central Highlands were inhabited exclusively by indigenous Mon-Khmer and Austronesian peoples (collectively called Montagnards — 'mountain people' — by the French) until French colonists arrived in the late 19th century and began coffee and rubber plantations. The first coffee seeds were planted by French missionaries in 1857; by the 1920s the robusta variety had proven ideally suited to the highland climate and Dak Lak became the plantation heartland of Indochina. During the Vietnam War the Montagnard peoples were recruited by both sides (the CIDG programme used them heavily as irregular…