Set far back from the much-trodden resort towns of Nha Trang and Mũi Né amidst the Central Highlands of Vietnam, where dense and misty jungles converge on rolling swaths of coffee bean plantations, the town of Buon Me Thuot is rarely tapped by tourists. Instead, this burgeoning city in the hills owes its rapid growth to industrial boom times and the intersection of three major Vietnamese highways. This means that those who do make it to its lorry-choked, scooter-thronged streets are in for one of the more real and visceral pictures of local Southeast Asian life.

Why not start by enlisting a Buon Ma Thuot tour guide to help pinpoint the best regional coffeehouses in town, where bitter brews of the area’s trademark robusta bean flow from the pots? Then move on to the Trung Nguyen Coffee Village, which unravels the story of this most famous of exports, or head out into the rustic town steads that pepper the surrounding countryside, to ride elephants at Ban Don or explore the traditional bamboo longhouses of the Mnong peoples that cluster on the shores of Lak Lake.