We spent two nights at the Hanoi Backpackers Hostel before going early to a small village called Mai Chau. It was a 4 hour drive and I had been out the night before (quite hard!) so it was a horrendous drive, oops!

The drive through the mountains was magnificent even if I felt delicate, although the driver was not taking any prisoners! High mountain passes with shear drops at mach 1 is pretty hairy! Just as we were pulling into the village on a table there was a pile of cut up meat and a very small head next to it, unfortunately it looked to be a dogs head. Yuk!

The village is tiny with only a few houses and is set in the valley with rice paddies in the surrounding area. If you can imagine a stereotypical Vietnamese setting then you're pretty spot on. It was beautiful. Our homestay was a house on stilts with a large room upstairs that had multiple beds, each with mosquito nets covering them. Downstairs, in the open, were tables and sofas to watch TV and each on. The houses are built like this so that downstairs they can keep their buffalo, although nowadays this is less likely.

After arriving we did the first tour which was of the local villages and through farms which we did by bicycle, it was great fun but a little too hot! We visited a women that made silk scarf's by hand, each took a week to make and each sells for 150,000 VND. 150,000 VND is less than £4! that means she earns less than £4 a week. It's amazing how people live so cheaply in Vietnam, but £4 is surely impossible to live off of?! After cycling through paddy fields we arrived at a very small village where we walked around the local shops which sold handmade swords and crossbows (probably other things but these were most interesting), not sure we'd get them into Australia though. Then we cycled back to the homestay for dinner, another massive meal, they know how to eat in Vietnam. After dark the house (more shack really) took us by surprise by blaring out strange Asian pop music, it was so loud we were convinced he was trying to entertain the whole valley. It seems the priorities out here are much different to at home; Technology comes first, followed by everything else.

The next day we took to the motorbikes, driving 60km up and around mountains, through herds of cattle and eating at another homestay. Our guide led us to see a bamboo factory that hand makes chopsticks (big industry here!) and to a great spot for seeing the rice paddies that covered the hillside.

Our lunch was at a similar house to where we were staying but in a village high in the mountains. It was an interesting one consisting of crickets, snails and rice wine, none of which tasted too bad. Cricket is crunchy and leaves its wings in your teeth, snails taste like they do in France and rice wine is lethal. Our guide wasn't sure if it was 5, 40 or 100%... it tastes like the latter. After lunch we walked a short distance to a cave that was lit up like a nightclub then drove back to our town. It was so hot and our guide realised we were struggling so took us to swim in the lake that was the locals bath by the looks of it, everyone was washing themselves in it. It was cold though so we didn't mind.

On our last day we did a shorter motorbike tour that went to a lake. We arrived there and found that the lake was about 30m lower than the banks so had to climb through thick clay mud to get too a fishing boat that was waiting below, less fishing boat more tin can actually. From there we motored over to a rock island in the middle of the lake where were jumped off the boat and could swim. That was welcomed because it was sweltering, again!

The rocks on the island were too tempting not to climb and jump from so the two of us climbed to a ledge and jumped off, first time successful. The second time, not so. I decided to try a different climb up and made it to the top, from there I could see Richard scrambling up the other side. He looked up and said "Hey Sam, these rocks are really loose!" but as he said it one fell away into the water, then the whole face started to fall away. I glanced over at the boat where everyone was looking in our direction and felt the rock underneath me start to move. I jumped off as far and as hard as I could and landed in the water quite far away from the island. As I surfaced I opened my eyes to a large boulder, about the size of me, inches from my face crashing into the water. Yikes! By this time Richard had made it to the top safely and I could just see boulders tumbling into the water, it sounded like thunder and was pretty scary! The rock face was at least 100ft tall...

Or 12ft, but it was still scary!

After cleaning up our cuts and drinking some rice wine we headed back to the motorbikes for our trip back to the homestay. The guides seemed a little drunk so it was double the speed back, wooo. We felt like some really terrible biker gang on our 125cc bikes. Still fun though! From the homestay we caught our minibus back to the hostel were we did another pub crawl and killed a few days until our flight to Sydney.

Asia = done.