I came to Vietnam for the traffic. When I first visited five years ago, I fell in love with the extreme sport of crossing a street, stepping off the curb into a wave of oncoming wheels -- cars, trucks, mopeds and bicycles.
Green and red traffic lights are mere ornaments here. Moving at a steady, even pace toward the distant sidewalk is like swimming through a school of motorized fish; magically, as if Moses were directing traffic, the stream parts and flows around you.
The "Crossing the Road" section in Footprint's Vietnam Handbook suggests that the concept of abandoning responsibility for your own life and placing it in the hands of the masses "is the closest Vietnam has ever come to true communism."
In any case, I was back, and this time I would be joining the traffic. I figured that if I was going to perish in a collision of buffalo-drawn carts or get slammed by a dragon-fruit vendor, I might as well do it in luxury. So I signed up with Butterfield & Robinson, a Toronto-based walking and cycling outfitter, for an 11-day bicycle trip from Ho Chi Minh City to the northern capital of Hanoi. That's almost 1,600 kilometres, but we would be cycling along carefully selected routes in scenic and culturally rich areas, in between hopping up the long coast by plane and minivan.
Our group of 15 gathered and met our guides at 5 a.m. on a monsoonal morning in Ho Chi Minh City before flying to the hill station of Da Lat. Our head guide, Anh (rhymes with "mine"), was an unflappable Vietnamese who has been heading up B&R's Vietnam cycling trips for seven years. His sidekick was a perpetually cheerful, curly haired local named Tam.
By 10 a.m., in Da Lat, we were introduced to our bicycles: sleek imports made by Rocky Mountain in Delta, B.C. It was love at first gear change as we whizzed through pine and bamboo forests, where couples in full wedding regalia posed for photos, leaning against guardrails on precipitous curves.
The highland air was cool and dry as mopeds stacked high with bales of freshly cut roses and gladiolas overtook us. But as Da Lat has an elevation of about 1,500 metres, by the time we pulled into a farmhouse along the way for lunch, we were all gasping to catch our breath.
Lunch, as it would be most days, was simple yet delicious, with ingredients fresh from the morning market. There were squares of fried tofu stuffed with minced lemongrass, morsels of beef wrapped and grilled in local la-lot leaves, venison on sugar-cane skewers, barbecued tuna wrapped in banana leaves, and -- everyone's favourite -- sautéed morning glory, a water-grown vegetable similar to spinach. Half of us hailed from Canada, including our 36-year-old guide, Chris Hakes, a witty vagabond who lists his home address as a storage locker in Toronto.
At breakfast the next morning in the Da Lat Palace Hotel -- a French colonial enclave of claw-foot tubs and cathedral ceilings -- I confessed to a couple of travellers in my group, Toronto chartered accountant Cheryl Smith and B&R staffer Anne Zakula, my long-term addiction to café sua da.
Promptly, the two were also dripping Vietnamese espresso onto dollops of sweetened condensed milk. The mixture is then stirred, poured over ice and injected into the neurological system through a straw. Fuelled on iced coffee, I surged into my first roundabout, a type of road junction where traffic has to follow a curved course. Everyone jostled to merge or exit at various spokes on the asphalt wheel.
There were points along the route where we could mistakenly veer off toward Cambodia, but at each point, a member of an army of moped-riding local helpers employed exaggerated arm-swinging to help steer us in the right direction. As a geographically challenged female, I came to love those full-body semaphore guys.
The following day, we exercised our braking technique, tackling 24 kilometres of downhill switchbacks. We descended into the hot, humid coastal climate, where we would spend the rest of our trip.
Near Nha Trang, which is known for its beaches, we spent two nights, as we did at every location. At the decadent new Evason Hideaway spa, we each had our own butler, plunge pool and wine cellar in our beachside bungalow.
