Vroom vroom Vietnam!

We spent the next week exploring Đà Lạt (or Dalat), in the central highlands, and then Mũi Né on the south coast by the best transport available in Vietnam: motorbike (sorry mum!).

Motorbikes have surely surpassed walking as the most-used form of transport in Vietnam. Everywhere you go there are people cleaning, repairing, and retooling them; hundreds of shops in each city and town sell helmets, fake designer-print seats and other bike 'bling'.

We wanted a piece of the action.

After another 'throw your hands in the air and declare"only-in-Asia!"' bus journey (involving a group of us being left stranded in the middle of the night for hours and fisticuffs, well almost, with the tour company), we rolled into Dalat.

Dalat, a cool, mountain town where there are no straight streets and no street signs...and no maps. It’s got good French credentials though: for years the French used Dalat as their vacation grounds, building giant European villas up in the hills. Even now, colourful european architecture permeates the place, making it look less like Vietnam and more of a run-down, Alps mountain town. While the town wasn't the lush, green haven we had hoped for, the surrounding fields are home to strawberry, dragonfruit and flower farms and beyond that are crop-covered hills, rolling into the distance.

At night, the streets in the centre of town come alive with street markets selling pretty much everything from food, clothes ('90s throwbacks, mostly), jewellery and more. With a temperate climate, there are stalls heaving with all kinds of fresh, leafy vegetables - glorious vegetables! What I wouldn't give for a good lettuce! (£1.5o, it turned out, that evening in a salad). People yelling and vending to the bitter end made for a colourful circus well into the night.

I'm getting side-tracked, back to the motorbikes. Vietnam was made for travel by motorbike, and the twists and turns of the verdantm central highlands offered coffee plantations, breathtaking vistas, sprinklings of minority villages and a healthy serving of fresh air. The roads were fairly clear and wide but just crazy enough to provide the occasional spike of adrenaline and make me grip onto Med just a little tighter.

We cruised through the mountain passes, surrounded by shades of green as far as the eye can see, trying to ask villagers for directions, followed by endless U-turns and head-scratching and occasional soakings by the monsoon rains.

This was pure freedom and euphoria! Only rudely interrupted, momentarily, by pot holes that made my bum that bit number.

We visited the Prenn and Datanla waterfalls, which cater for Asian tourists and honeymooners, because for Westerners it is surely cheesier than a packet of Wotsits (although we spoke to some who seemed to love them). The waterfalls are nothing short of beautiful, or at least they were 20 years earlier, but the carnival stalls, cable cars, plastic menagerie, ostrich rides and man in a monkey warrior suit made this something more

akin to a tacky theme park than a natural beauty spot. We were perplexed and hurried back to our motorbike, escaping the gaggles of photo-posing, Chinese tourists.

Still, Dalat was a free-wheeling snapshot of the highlands of Vietnam and a nice heat reprieve before our next destination: Mũi Né, which was all sizzling beaches, slapping on suncream and sand dunes.

Mũi Né is a jumbled mix of quiet,fishing village and lazy beach town. As we strolled along the thin, long stretch of beach on our first day, we watched fisherman pulling nets, pushing paddles through the water in round boats and shouting back and forth to each other.

After a few days of languishing by the beach, we teamed up with our new friends, Aoife and Mark, and rented motorbikes. We enjoyed a breezy day on the road: almost conned by a cheeky monk at a long-lost monastery, biking to sand dunes and canyons, that had clearly grown legs and moved since the map was printed, sand sledding with entrepreneurial little kids who would make Lord Alan Sugar proud (as much for their potty mouths as for their money-making schemes), breathing in the pungent pong of shrimps that are dried in there billions at the side of the road to make Mũi Né's famous fish sauce, swimming in the sea on a local beach while in fear of getting robbed, stocking up on beer

during Happy Hour(s) and keeping them in the fridge behind the bar, tucking in with our fingers to platefuls of fresh seafood, and nursing bad sunburn (not mine, for I'm still obsessed with the factor 30).

So, in summary, motorbiking in Vietnam is an incredible experience and can be done safely, it's the odd, hoodwinking monk and Alan Sugar's scruffy, pint-sized protégés that you need to watch out for!