We've spent the last two days happily cruising through the Vietnamese central highlands on the back of motorbikes, sampling food with the locals and experiencing the real Vietnam (including a bit of karaoke!).

We decided that with only a few days left in South East Asia we'd squeeze in one last experience that people rave about and booked a two day Easy rider motorbike tour from Dalat (in the hills) to Mui Ne (by the beach).

As we met our guides 'Peter' and 'Terry' we hoped we'd see a bit more of Vietnam life with the added bonus of avoiding another bus ride.Straight away we knew these two were characters and that our journey would be entertaining.Our now enormous backpacks were strapped to the back of the bikes and we set off to see the sights of Dalat before hitting the hills.After stopping at the 'Crazy House' - a hotel built to be exactly that like something out of Alice in Wonderland, we left the busy streets and visited coffee plantations and a silk factory.I found this really interesting as we saw the cocoons of silk worms being fed into hand-operated machinery, which was then woven into silk fabric.Before lunch there was time to see the enormous and powerful Elephant waterfall - we climbed the bottom and behind the spray at the base.

One of the best things about having local guides was that they took us into local restaurants to eat (where there are no menus let alone in English) and ordered us local food at local prices.The bbq-ed pork and rice was pretty good and set us up to ride through the hilsl and stop at a tea plantation before visiting Terry's family home.By this point we were far from tourist towns and we were warmly welcomed into their home.Terry's family own a small coffee plantation and following some years of good production and good prices were building a large new property for the whole family on their land.Normally we would have stayed the night here but with the building work going on we enjoyed dragon fruit from the garden and some green tea before moving on to a local hotel - we would be seeing more of the family and friends again though at dinner.Interestingly we were told that to build the house (large with probably 5 bedrooms upstairs) cost about £15,000 to build and it sprung up quickly in a matter of months because builders here are paid a set amount so they worked hard to get it finished on time.

We visited one more beautiful waterfall (Dum bri waterfall) before reaching our hotel in Bao Loc where we would stay for the night.It was here we started to notice that westerners were a rare thing and the locals were interested to see us out and about with our guides.

Liz