Born To Be Mild in the Central Highlands

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The journey to Da Lat wasn't great. The bus broke down after the rear had filled up with smoke, we couldn't go faster than 40 km/hour, and we knew we'd paid far too much for the tickets. But the scenery was good, and we were excited about taking a tour with the Easy Riders.

We'd been told about the Easy Riders in Bolivia. They're a group of tour guides with motorbikes who take you around the country for however long you want, at the pace you want, stopping when you want. We'd been lucky enough to bump into two of them in HCMC, Mr Wing & Mr Thai,and we'd immediately got on well with them.

When we got into Da Lat we discovered that most people with a motorbike will tell you that they're an Easy Rider. It get's quite annoying. The real, original Easy Riders have blue and red jackets, cards and a comments book. And they're excellent. Some of the other guys looked a bit dodgy and only spoke a little English. After meeting up with Mr Wing & Mr Thai we decided to go for it and hire them for a five day trip through the central highlands to Hoi An, even though it blew the budget at $50 each per day.

That has been the best $500 we've spent.

Turns out that Mr Wing & Mr Thai have been Easy Riders for some nine years, and Mr Wing was probably the first moto guide to take a tourist between from city to city when Viet Nam first opened up to tourists in '96 and people were still getting ambushed by bandits in the countryside (he's a bit of a celebrity in Da Lat). These guys were brilliant guides, partly because they were older and had lived through Viet Nam's recent history (Mr Wing fought in the war), partly because of their experience and excellent English,but mainly because they were really good company. Okay, the bikes were only 100cc Honda Wings, but we ruled the roads for 5 days. Unless we had to go up a steep hill,  when Chesta would slow Mr Wing down a fair bit.

We saw silk worms, walked round a silk factory, ate some wonderful food, met  people from some of the 70 or so different  ethnic tribes in Viet Nam, wandered round ancient villages, rode a massive bull elephant, visited waterfalls, learnt about the war, walked some of the Ho Chi Minh trail, ate incredible food, walked over some ropey old bridges, visited the Happy Buddha (which is the point we realised why random people were coming up and rubbing Chesta's belly - for good luck), learnt how to grow rice (we'll never look at a bag of rice the same way again), learnt how to make rice wine, drank rice wine (Happy Water), visited orphanages (tough), ate amazing food, watched rice paper being made, saw how some of the areas sprayed with Agent Orange are still treeless, and loads more. Best of all was the reaction from locals as we motored through villages well away from the tourist trail. Everyone waved, shouted hello, smiled and stared. The kids especially - we'd take pictures and show them, and they'd be fascinated by it all (as were the parents to be fair). It was fantastic to have these two great geeza's acting as our interpreters and guides for the five days, we saw and learnt about so much of Viet Nam that we would never have been able to without them. It was a real shame saying goodbye to them in Hoi An, we felt like we were saying goodbye to friends. We'll definitely come back just to spend another week on the road with them.

If you're interested you can contact them on wingstours@hotmail.com or thainguyenhuong2003 @yahoo.com .

The reason why we wanted to get to Hoi An was to pick up some suits and things to send back to England. Hoi An is the City of a Thousand Tailors, and these fellas can knock out a decent fitted suit for about 25 quid. We thought as we're getting hitched when we get back home we should probably take advantage. We ended up staying there for a week. We got some nice stuff, but it would have been better if we'd had some definite ideas about what we wanted before we got there. The shop owners are good at telling you that it all looks lovely, and you should buy another. It's easy to leave with some right old bollocks, although our fitted leather flip flops are rather nice. Whilst we were there we met up with a couple of aussie's who'd done a similar Easy Rider tour (& loved it), called Caliph and Iva. They were very nice and a great laugh, and we didn't get anything done whilst they were there because we were all too pissed.

After a week in Hoi An we were running out of time on our visa's. We'd have liked to see some more of the sites around Hoi An and Hue, but reasoned that they're not going anywhere so will have to wait. We bussed it to Danang, a charmless city port with a Laos consulate, where we sorted out our Laos visa's and walked around in the rain. Once the visa's approved we bought a nonstop sleeper bus ticket across the border. Then had to change bus three times and get a hotel. Bastards.

Out of all the countries that we've visited so far Viet Nam has been the friendliest. We only visited the South and central regions, but the people that we met were amazing (bar the tosser who sold us the final bus ticket). We were sad to leave and will definitely return. Laos has a hard act to follow.