Tour of People
In my opinion, one of the best things about travelling is other travellers. If I’m honest, it is also one of the worst things, too. I cringe from embarrassment as I watch travelling jackasses behave ignorantly and/or disrespectfully to people in a different country. However, more often than not, I love meeting random people and finding out where they’re from, where they’re going and collecting opinions on destinations. It’s so easy to strike up a conversation with other people on the road* and especially easy to have a good laugh if we’re all in the midst of a harrowing journey. How else, other than travelling, would we ever have had the opportunity to meet so many people from other countries? Dutch, Italian, Israeli and Spanish in India, Brits in Mongolia, Germans, Koreans, Japanese and Australians in Vietnam, South Africans in Thailand, and an endless stream of Canadians. Most recently, we met two other Calgarians while swimming in a river in the mountains of Vietnam. She and I grew up in the same quadrant of the city.
As an interesting side note, most of the people that we run into and spend time with seem to be of the same demographic as we: couples who are in their early thirties who have quit their jobs to travel long term around the world. Relatively speaking, nobody is rich or has a trust fund or any such pool of cash, but that hasn’t seemed a deterrent. Like attracts like and I guess that’s why we connect so well with these travellers and keep in touch in case we are able to cross paths again. And always, any extended conversation between any four of us will devolve into “the worst bathroom in the world” competition.
One recommendation that we got from several other people who had been to Vietnam was to go on an Easy Rider tour. Actually, it was less a recommendation and more an insistence because the tour is universally beloved among travellers. In the mountain town of Dalat, there is a club of about 70 guys who offer guided motorcycle tours of Central Vietnam. Actually, for $50 per day, they’re willing to take tourists pretty much anywhere they wish to go inside the country. We weren’t in Dalat one hour before we approached by one of these fellows and offered a tour, so it was easy for us to arrange a six day trip through the mountains, along part of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail and ending on the coast. **
Now that we’ve arrived safe and sound in Hoi An, I must say that this was one of the best and most interesting things we have done anywhere in the world in the last nine months. Our two guides, Bang and Thiet were friendly, English-speaking, knowledgeable fellows who had a pile of information to share about the people of Vietnam, the traditions of the cultures in the mountains, the language, the war and just about anything else we wanted to know. We stopped frequently to visit silkworm farms, coffee farms, a silk-making factory, a mushroom farm, old mountain villages, and national parks. Really, it was like nothing we had ever done before and such a brilliant experience. Because we were travelling by motorbike, we not only got to see so much more of the country than we would have while travelling by bus, but we were able to meet some of the people along the way. That was my favourite part.
(The woman squatting down in this picture is nearly 100 years old.)
* I have to add a note here to say that it is humbling that so many other people in the world speak English as a second (or third, or fourth!) language.
** If anyone reading this is inclined to take the tour, email us and we’ll give you the names and email addresses of two of the best EasyRider guides. They’ll arrange tours by email and even do a pick-up right from an airport.