We've just arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) with aching bums but smiling faces after three days riding a couple of motorbikes from Dalat in the central highlands.

A few days ago we arrived in Dalat after an exhausting 12 hour bus ride. We were immediately greeted by a skinny, smily and familiar looking man offering to take us into town to his 'cousins' hotel. His name was Sau. This translates to Star, which everyone in town seemed to know him as. For a good price we jumped on the back of he and his mates bikes. Ten minutes later we arrived and were all but convinced to take up an offer to ride with this guy for 350km all the way to Saigon.

We slept on it and in the morning agreed to let him take us on a day tour of Dalat first to test the water. Having never rode a full-size manual motorbike before, Aidan decided this was a good chance to learn. Jess jumped on the back with Star and Aidan frog-hopped and wobbled along behind.

Star turned out to be a pretty knowledgeable and well connected guide. He took us to visit the Hang Nha 'Crazy House', a hotel a bit like Alice in Wonderland crossed with Willy-Wonka's chocolate factory, and designed by a crazy old Vietnamese lady who studied architecture in Russia. After a good sticky-beak, we took off to see the former-king Bao Dai's summer palace, a Buddhist meditation centre, an old railway that was bombed to near redundancy during the war, a women's embroidery centre and a waterfall at the end of a toboggan run. The nicest part of the day though was riding around the very beautiful Tuyen Lam Lake just out of town. This, combined with the dread of another long and bumpy bus ride, convinced us to commit to a two day sightseeing ride down to Saigon.

That night we walked around Dalat, stretching out our legs before our big motorbike ride. The people of Dalat really made us aware that we were now in the South and that the divide which triggered their civil war had not been completely subdued by a unified government. The few locals we talked with were very critical and bitter towards their communist government. One explained that, despite his good grades at university, he will never be allowed to be a policeman, soldier or earn a good salary because his parents worked with the US army. The government apparently do a family check over five generations before they give out certain jobs. This was a good insight into the ongoing impacts people are experiencing from the war and the tensions which still exist between the north and the south.

With our minds a little more open, we left early the next day to start our journey further south. Star took us to see just about every farm and factory ever imagined to exist in southern Vietnam. We gawked at vegie patches, rice paddies, a silk factory, a brick factory, a rice wine distillery in a backyard shed, a happy family making incense sticks and ladies making brooms, as well as vast crops of gerbera, roses, coffee plants, tea plantations, pepper, mushrooms, tobacco, passionfruit and rubber trees. He took us to a big waterfall and an even bigger Buddha - by far the happiest giant Buddha we've ever seen! He even stopped by a town on the outskirts of Saigon to buy us some special rice cakes, unique to that place! They were so good we bought five more!

Star was mostly a really good guide. He was honest, very patient and spoke English well, apart from that Vietnamese habit of not pronouncing the last letter in a word - Aidan was known as Ada and Jess as Je. He took us to eat at some really tasty and cheap little family restaurants, with his favorite catchphrase 'good meal, good bill!'

Star, however, had one very frustrating habit. Whatever the reason, Star's view of women seemed to be stuck back in the Victorian era - without any witty Jane Austin to lighten the mood! He flatly refused to acknowledge Jess when he was explaining the mechanics of a factory and there was no chance of Star letting her ride the bike. When it came to saying goodbye, Star shook Aidan's hand, wished his family well, and walked off without a glance at Jess. The one exception was at the flower farm, where he insisted that Jess pose in the garden as 'girl's love flowers!' We both had to fight back our frustration, laugh it off, and put his apparent rudeness down to cultural differences...

Despite this, riding a bike was a great way to get a feel for how most Vietnamese live their day-to-day lives. Everone we met had such infectious positive attitudes, welcoming smiles and seemed genuinely flattered that we were interested in their way of life. They seemed so proud of their work and went out of their way to show us how things operate (without expecting any money in return!) We learnt more in three days than we had in our first three weeks in Vietnam.

The traffic was pretty quiet most of the way. We only passed one truck that had been nudged off the road and into a ditch, probably due to one of the maniac tour buses tearing down the hill and overtaking on a blind corner! As we got closer to Saigon the traffic increased, and we found ourselves dodging between big dirty trucks, and navigating roundabouts through hundreds of other motorbikes. By the end of it we were pretty happy to move back into the world of pedestrians and check out Saigon on foot.