difficult rider

Dina was only the second American we had met since we began our trip who is in Asia only for travel (all the other Americans and Canadians (both few in number) are living and working in here). She had been in Southeast Asia for about two months, and enjoyed herself, but there was one activity she did that blew away all of her other experiences. She met some guys in a town in the central highlands who are part a loosely affiliated gang of motorcycle tour guides. She took a one-day tour of the surrounding countryside, and was convinced it was worth paying $50 a day (roughly 3-4 days budget for us) to go on a nine-day tour. She could not stop raving about how wonderful her trip was. The places they went, the things she saw, she loved it all. The biggest draw, according to our little Dina, was that you had a chance to get off of the tourist track (which in this country, is such a well beaten track that you see the same backpackers in town after town after town). Also, she loved having the chance to have a personalized guide who spoke English very well and could actually answer her questions about everything and help her communicate with local people. Looking back, she may have been on the payroll of Easy Rider (the name of the loosely affiliated group of guides), her endorsement was so incredibly strong.

Well, we were already weary of overly touristy towns and night buses full of backpackers, so the whole deal sounded pretty good to us. We hadn't planned on going as far south as Dalat, or into the central highlands at all, but when someone tells you about "the best thing in Vietnam" they've done, you tend to listen. After several days careful consideration, scrupulous budget checking, calendar inspection and soul searching, we decided Easy Rider would be in our future.

Dalat is really a lovely town, perched up at about 1,500 meters in a welcomingly cool atmosphere. Unlike most other towns we've been to, it feels like a real town, not some hollow shell of a town that houses only tourist related businesses. As a sidenote, it's also Vietnam's honeymoon capital, and the most incredibly tacky place I think I've ever been (Korea included). We hadn't been in the town four minutes before we were approached by an Easy Rider guide who was ready to whisk us away at that moment. We were too exhausted from 21 hours on a bus to discuss business, and we politely told him so and took his card. Surprisingly, he accepted our plea for a moment of solitude, gave us his card, and headed out. About five minutes later, the same guy came up to us and informed us that we were walking away from town, not towards it. Then he jumped back into the sales pitch. With gentle forcing, he again let up. Our third approach from an Easy Rider was from a different guy, who had higher English proficiency, but more heavy handed sales tactics. We slithered away with another business card, and began discussing our options. One plus side to booking our trip as soon as possible was that we would have an easy excuse for not being hassled anymore. By the time our first guide (who I will now refer to using his name, Quy (pronounced "We")) accosted us again in the center of town, we had all but decided to go with him because he was slightly less pushy.

That this was a mistake was mostly apparent to us by the end of our trip planning meeting over coffee. Not that Quy is a bad guy, but the language barrier was obviously going to be a problem. By this time, however, it was too late, the deal was done, the contract signed, the deposit paid. We were going with Quy and his buddy for a two day trip through the central highlands and down to Jungle Beach. We had one day to rest in Dalat before departure. It was pleasant, but I will skip the details (suffice it to say we visited a place called "Crazy House").

We left on Friday morning. The sky was overcast, but not threateningly so. Our belongings were acceptably waterproofed and strapped to the back of the bikes. Quy gave us what was to become an extremely overly used "Rock and Roll!" and high tens all around. Our first stop was an over the top Buddhist temple dominated by gaudy brightly painted concrete statues of dragons and bearded monkeys. Our second stop was a flower farm. Both stops mostly involved cheesey jokes from Quy rather than information.

The next couple of stops were nice, when the other guide, Lee (my driver), took us to see how some everyday items are produced. Lee showed us a coffee plantation and explained a bit about coffee cultivation, and then showed us a silkworm farm followed by a silk production factory. Seeing how silk is made was particularly fascinating; the worm weaves a cocoon, and then basically the cocoon is unraveled to gain the silk threads. The majority of our stops were about like this, we would ride for about twenty minutes, and then Lee would show us how something is made. The only exception was a waterfall with a super sketchy approach that every other guide except ours helped their clients navigate.

At lunch was when the upselling really began in earnest. Instead of having meaningful conversation and getting to know Vietnamese people, we spent most of our meal (and dinner as well) fighting off Lee and Quy's attempts to convince us to lengthen our trip. This was annoying at lunch, but heartbreaking at dinner when the table next to us was a similar tour group having what sounded like an interesting conversation about the war, and then (on a different topic) laughing hysterically. And there we were, still trying to get our head guide to understand that we live in Korea, and telling both of our guides for the 23rd time that day that we could not afford another day of $50 touring. This soured our mood for the trip.

Guide relations aside, the trip was really spectacular. We careened along remote two lane roads the tourist buses could never fit on. We passed breathtaking mountain scenery, with alternating coffee plantations, pine forest, and jungle. We dipped down into wide valleys carpeted in bright green and yellow rice fields. We sped through towns where all the children would shout hello and wave at us as we drove by. We saw people at work, people at play, people living their day to day lives in the absence of hordes of backpack laden caucasians. It was harvest time, so people were out in the fields, cutting down the rice, and everyone's front yard, as well as stretches of the road, were were covered in drying rice grains or coffee beans. If the purpose was to get off of the tourist track, we succeeded. No matter how negatively I may portray our guides, they did take us to see amazing places and people, activities and crops that were genuinely interesting and informative. The only really questionable "sights" we went to were when we visited minority people. Mostly what these visits seemed like was we would show up, the guys would hand out candies and cigarettes, and kind of be like: "look at the poor people". It made me more than a little uncomfortable.

We only got a bit of rain on the second day, and the trip was far from a disappointment overall. We saw interesting sights, we went places of the main circuit. We escaped the night buses, and had delicious meals we never would have been able to order on our own. But what we missed out on was the human connection that weighed heavily on Dina's Easy Rider assessment. We didn't make new Vietnamese friends, or really get to know our guides at all. We didn't get a chance to speak with Vietnamese people through our guides. We didn't even get coherent answers to our questions. The only human contact we had was constant upselling and insincere high fives. That left a bit of a salty taste in my mouth.

On the upside, we spent the next three days sitting out the rains in a beachside backpackers resort where we could rest, read, swim in the rain, eat delicious food and slide down mountains, gashing open our knees. Both experiences were totally worth it in their own different way.