The Dalat Easyriders

So last night I was with Jen and two elderly Vietnamese men drunk and eating dinner of beef salad, rice and chicken wings. To order three beers in Vietnamese you say "ba, bababa", the novelty of this new and important linguistic phrase is probably why we kept ordering more beer.

The night before last we also had dinner with the same Vietnamese men and one of them had purchased rice wine. If I thought the bababa was dangerous then the rice wine was lethal.

The two men are called Wing and Thai.

Wing has offered me to return to Vietnam to marry his daughter, Thai has offered his son to Jenny as an option. This arranged marriage would mean that Wing and Thai would become our "ba ba", which as well as being the word for beer is also the word for father. Wing and Thai are both quite big on jokes.

For the past three days I have been shooting over green mountains and zipping past rice fields on the back of a motorbike driven by Thai. Jen has been with Wing and I can safely say that it has been the highlight of our entire trip so far.

Wing and Thai are part of an increasingly famous motorcycle tour group called the Easyriders which is based in the city of Dalat in Vietnam. As a country Vietnam is well known for making fake copies of good designer products and the Easyriders are no exception. As soon as Jen and I stepped off the bus we were approached by a man claiming to be an Easyrider, we were offered Easyrider tours from our hotel and were starting to wonder how we could find the real Easyriders. We eventually went on the internet and found that whilst they do not have an office, the motorcycle men all like to hang out at a cafe in town.

It was at this cafe that we met Wing who Jen later described as being "exactly how I imagined an Easyrider would look like". He seemed like a walking history book and not just because his skin was leathery and he looked a little worn round the edges. He was clearly full of some stories and his English was excellent, we both decided immediately that we had found our Easyrider.

And he really did have some stories. His military base was attacked and out of 200 soldiers who fled the base only 7 made it to the nearest town, and he was one of them. More amazing still is that I recall learning about this event during my history lessons at school.

Wing and Thai were both brilliant tour guides and through them we got to see the Vietnamese countryside, its people and their different ways of life. Some memorable stops were to the rice wine, silk and chopstick making factories, waterfalls, and coffee plantations to name just some. The best part though was the countryside itself. No pictures I took will do the changing landscape justice, it felt like I was continuously in a car commercial where the vehicle is twisting and turning through curves and valleys...

...Except I was on a bike, which is now in my opinion far more fun than any car could ever be.

I now want to buy a motorbike and go touring round the world.



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