The Motorcycle Diaries

Five day tour of the Central Highlands in Vietnam, starts in Dalat on Sunday morning at 8am, finishes at 2pm on Thursday in Hoi An - 1000km covered roughly! First task is to strap our bags to the back of the bikes and then work out how we also fit on! It all works out fine...HELMETS ON!...and away we go.

Here's a list of things we did (in an attempt to reduce the size of this blog!)

1. Crazy House in Dalat; a house created by a politicians daughter (no doubt the only reason it got built in the first placeit's a little wierd with attriubutes like a Kangaroo room with a stuffed kangaroo in it with red eyes...nice to wake up to in the middle of the night! a Giraffe room, one with giant ants...
2. The tofu making factory AKA a converted back room of a house, tofu is mingin'
3. Greenhouses where they grow and supply flowers to parts of Vietnam
4. A house that breeds silkworms
5. A house that makes the bamboo plates that the silkworms live on
6. A factory that turns spins the silkworms silk and makes material
7. The elephant waterfall where we got to stand inside in the spray (amazing!)
8. A clothes making factory
9. A minority village where families live in stilt houses (animals live under the house) and kids come sream "hello" "bye-bye" at you excitedly
10. People separating rice using a machine
11. One lady separating rice by hand! (Beating it with a stick)
12. One lady dropping her rice on the road?!?! So the cars and bikes drive over it and separate it for her!
13. A house in the minority village
14. Tea plantations
15. Coffee plantations
16. Coffee Villas...if people hold a plantation for 15 years under the government then they get a house built for them. So there are many roads lined with wooden shacks interspersed with these huge brick built, colourful, rich-looking houses!
17. Passionfruits on trees
18. Avocados on trees
19. Pineapples (grow on top of the ground)
20. Cinnamen bush
21. Deep heat comes from weeds!
22. Blacksmiths
23. Resevoirs
24. Banana plants
25. A motorbike with a passenger holding a door upright between him and the driver! We are no longer surprised by anything that we see here!
26. Shrapnel damaged buildings
27. How to make rice wine
28. Brickmakers
29. Granite being split and collected on the roadside
30. Picture perect rice fields with worker's in Vietnamese hats
31. Drove through herds of cows and buffalos on their way to the grazing fields
32. A church ruined in the war
33. A mushroom farm (with a pet python)
34. Cement pottery for Bonsai trees
35. Market
36. A natural pool which we could swim in
37. More waterfalls
38. War memorial
39. Pick up some petrol...sit and have some tea in the forecourt with the owners...oh and some cigarettes too! Safe as houses!
40. How noodles are made
41. Peppercorns being grown, dried and made into pepper
42. Cashew nut trees
43. Rubber trees where latex comes from when you strip back the bark
44. Sea lake in Kontum
45. Drank sugar juice from sugar canes at the market
46. Another minority village
47. An old man playing us some music
48. The biggest pig ever (alive) wrapped in mesh wiring and sat on the back of a motorbike
49. Round house where minority people celebrate big events
50. Wooden Church
51. Orphanage
52. Another war memorial
53. Ho Chih Minh Trail
54. Tapioca being made
55. Parts of metal/weapons collected from the countryside to be sold
56. Monkey bridges- bridges made by the minority people who dont look too skilled at bridge making to be fair...although however unsafe they looked or felt four kids came bounding across the bridge without a care in the world
57. A truck which had tipped over on it's side when it hit a ditch...it was one of those moments when you round a corner to see an accident and your heart leaps into your throat then you realise that the driver has strung his hammock up on the underside of the lorry between the axels and looks fairly content!
58. People panning for gold
59. Cham Tower
60. Rice paper being made

And that was about it...we arrived in Hoi An! The jungle views were stunning and it was much nicer seeing it from the back of a bike rather than being on a bus and sleeping through it all! And we only found out afterwards that there are some attempted attacks on tourists from people that hide out in the jungle...Titi and Hiep were very Dad-like though so we had nout to worry about.