Flavors of the Central Highlands

March in the Central Highlands is the season of coffee flowers, a typical industrial plant, suitable for the red basalt soil. In the Central Highlands, there is a Buon Ma Thuot coffee variety that is not only famous domestically but also famous far and wide. There is the passionate coffee quality in the song Ly ca phe Ban Me by musician Nguyen Cuong. And in poetry, with Xuan Dieu - a poet of love - the color of coffee flowers makes the poet ecstatic:

The coffee smells so good, honey.

Flowers in tune with jasmine

Ivory white, clear as jade, beautiful and bright

Like your mouth smiling somewhere here

The time when coffee flowers bloom is also the time when the Central Highlands bustles with the gong sounds of early spring festivals such as the famous Elephant Racing Festival, the Central Highlands Spring Festival... There, next to the pure white coffee flowers are the Ede girls dressed in charming indigo brocade costumes. Few people know the intricacies behind each dress and jewelry that the Central Highlands women wear during the early spring festivals.

Each costume is like a work of art in which the region's unique hand-weaving technique creates its own unique nuances alongside the masterpiece of color coordination and pattern composition. The waistband of the skirts of Central Highlands women is often adorned with beaded bracelets and bronze bells to create pleasant sounds when moving. There are two types of skirts: open skirts and closed skirts. Open skirts are a piece of fabric wrapped around the body. Closed skirts have two edges sewn into a tube shape. During the Coffee Festival, on the streets of Buon Ma Thuot, the gongs and drums are bustling, Central Highlands girls in traditional costumes, holding coffee flower branches, walking on stilts and dancing xoang dances. They are like beautiful H'Bia and Bing girls stepping out of fairy tales, epics - long poems of the Ede and M'Nong people, bringing beautiful colors to the land and sky of the Central Highlands.

Flowers and people seem to be two inseparable entities that create the beauty of the land. When spring comes, in the green of the leaves and the brown of the soil, a pure white, sweet and passionate color of coffee flowers appears. In the blooming season, white spreads everywhere, white in the gardens, white on the hillsides, white on the roadsides, all around and the sky and earth are filled with flowers. The flower buds are small and pretty, but when they bloom, they form large clusters that spread out. Each leaf axil grows into a cluster, each branch is dense with clusters of flowers that look like white cotton balls on the coffee tree. That flower shimmers under the highland sun, both simple and a bit noble. Because each flower season brings to the people of the Central Highlands joyfulness, full of hope, promising a prosperous and happy life.

Heritage Magazine