| The motorbike adventure begins outside the Peace 1 Hotel - Dalat Posted Tuesday, 18 July 2006 | ||
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| Where was I? Oh yes. So Dalat. Well, the romance honey pot and hot spot of central Vietnam proved to be little more than a damp squib halfway up a mountain with lashings of Soviet chic architecture and a replica of the Eiffel Tower. Wendy and I left the next day. And in some style. We waved goodbye to Dalat from the back of two rather hunky chunky and funky motorbikes driven by the Easy Riders – namely Dave and a guy who’s name I can’t remember as it was very Vietnamese and probably involved the word Nguyen somewhere which, I am reliably told, is the surname to over half the country’s population. It’s like a great big banal mixture of the Smith, Brown and Jones surnames. The Easy Riders are a bunch of silver stallion riding tour guides who will take you around the very impressive Central Vietnamese Highlands for as long or as little as you like giving you the chance of getting off the legions of tour buses which traverse Highway 1 along the coast and seeing something of the countyside. So Dave and Nguyen told us to load day bags and then lashed our rucksacks to the back of the bikes - a nifty move which also allowed the rucksacks to double as big squashy cushions for most of the trip. Then it was big helmets on and off we went. I love riding on motorbikes – it’s the same feeling of imminent death you get on a rollercoaster. And going round the rather tight hairpin bends in the mountains it sometimes felt all a bit too scary. But, after a while, you stopped holding on for dear life and settled back into your big comfy backpack (probably gently squeezing open a bottle of sun tan lotion with the same movement) reassured that maybe the guy driving knows what he's doing. First stop was the Crazy House – a kind of Snow White’s castle if Snow White had been born in Barcelona around Gaudi’s time (pics on next few pages). After that we saw a veritable smorgasbord of sights one only gets to see when you’re riding with a Vietnamese bloke who has lots of mates in the countryside. We saw engaging things like a silk factory (I ate a silk worm and it does not like taste like an unsalted peanut like they tell you - It tastes likes a desiccated and very dry insect), a tea plant, an alligator farm (would probably fail average health and safety check), a rubber tree plantation (bugs drowned in white goo) and a roadside cafe next to a almost complete dam where foreign engineers can clock off work, have a steak, lager and a local girl. Then we saw some fairly tedious things like a brick factory (big red muddy lake) and a mulberry tree (no really! My bum hurts and I’m hungry now). And you wouldn’t believe how much flies like to lay their eggs in noodles drying in the sun. In the town of Bao Loc we stopped to buy food from the market for dinner and for the first time for quite some time realised we really were quite a spectacle for the locals. Our hotel that night was perched near the Dam’bri waterfall – perhaps the most spectacular we’d seen. But the hotel itself was pure The Shining. Us and our drivers were the only people there. There were only three staff, massive Seventies room and not a light blinked in the distance all night long. The only illumination in our bedroom came from either a red or green bulb giving the room either a brothel look, or the feel of a murder scene. As the chef cooked our dinner our drivers discussed (over the requisite rice whisky and beers) how to keep a woman happy and what you can get shot for in Vietnam. In fact all was going well until chef announced we had to drink up as she wanted to go to bed. This rather put the kybosh on my plan to get further in-depth knowledge of lady-wooing. You know, just in case. The next day, at the crack of arse, we wandered through a forest drenched in morning sunshine and revisited the waterfall which like last night was empty of people. But the lift from the top of the falls to the bottom, the bridges and café, suggested it was once full of people which only added to the Shining Factor. As we left, however, we got chatting to a coach load of white and green shirted Vietnamese who had just turned up. “You are from Britain!” head man said, “We all work at BP!” he continued pointing at the logo on his shirt. Which sort of sums up Vietnam really. In many ways pure South East Asia but getting richer and more developed all the time. As we got closer to Ho Chi Minh City the Castrol, BP and Mobil stations became more frequent as did the Honda garages and ads for Colgate toothpaste. Far too quickly we had entered the motorways encircling Saigon/HCMC and we were soon dropped off at a reasonably priced hotel in the tourist district of Saigon 1 (called ‘Foreigner Town’ by locals). As Dave and Nguyen left they pointed us in the direction of a bar called Allez Boo and said it was right up our street. As we entered we could hear British indie music and all the people we’d left on the tour buses (both lovely and annoying) were all there beckoning us over. And all at once we’d plugged ourselves back into backpacker world. | ||
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