Our time in Vietnam was drawing to a close. Just four days until our flight from Saigon to Bangkok. Although we had enjoyed Vietnam, we didn't feel like we had engaged it as much as we did China. We felt like we travelled through it rather than wading in its murky guts. We wanted to meet the locals. We wanted to get away from the crowds. We wanted to be surprised. As Albert Brooks said in his movie about travelling to the Old West, we wanted to "touch Indians."

We were in Dalat, an old French hillstation in south-central Vietnam. It was a delightful town. If you squinted your eyes almost closed and held your hand up to block out big parts of your view you might even think some of it looked like a vaguely european town. Best of all, the air at night was cool and fresh and the hillsides were covered in pine.

As we stepped off our bus from Nha Trang we were beseiged -- as you always are -- by a crowd of people trying to sell this and that. Guides. Hotels. Tours. Handicrafts. We've gotten good at tuning these crowds out, throwing "No thank you's" liberally about and staring straight ahead. As when dealing with terrorists or hijackers you don't want to make eye-contact or they will single you out.

One guy, however, caught our attention. He spoke good, understandable English and offered to give us a 1-day tour of the area. He was well prepared with laminated pictures of the stuff we would see, and he had a little book in which other travellers had written good notes about tours they had taken with him.

He said his name was Phuc (pronounced "fook", not pronounced like a teenage boy would like it pronounced) and that his side-kick's name was My (pronounced "may"). They were in their early to mid 40's and wore big smiles.

We were only planning on spending one day in Dalat before catching a bus to Saigon, so a quick one-day tour of the area made a lot of sense. Most of the interesting sites are outside of the town itself, so our only alternative to a package tour was to hire guides ourselves. We agreed on a price and he said that he and My would be back the next morning at 8:00 to pick us up.

The next morning, there they were waiting patiently outside our hotel. We hopped on the back of their motorcycles -- Sarah with Phuc, me with My -- and raced off.

It was an interesting day. We saw a couple nice waterfalls, a minority village, some historical sites and temples. There were a few duds, like the "Hang Nga Guesthouse," a theme-hotel that our guidebook called "amazing" and "unique in all the world" but turned out to be a cheesy Disney-meets-Niagra-Falls-honeymoon-hotel thing with rooms set into giant fake tree trunks. It was designed and owned by the daughter of a former President of Vietnam, so I have a feeling people are just afriad to say how ugly it is for fear of being sent to a re-education camp.

Our guide Phuc had been a farmer for 20 years and the most interesting part of our day was when we stopped at farms along the way. We saw the usual mix of lettuce, potatoes, corn, but also coffee, tea, bananas, and more. In the afternoon we stopped at a silk hamlet where we saw villagers filling bamboo racks full of handfulls of silkworms that head been feeding on mulberry leaves. We saw racks further along in the process that held completed caccoons. If I understood Phuc correctly, each thumb-sized caccoon supplied 800 meters of silk thread.

At the end of the day we were pleased enough with Phuc and My and we were anxious enough to see more of "the real" Vietnam that we decided to hire them to take us to Saigon -- the long way.

From Dalat, we would head northwest (away from Saigon), over a mountain range. We would stay in a small village that night, then spend a long second day driving south, skirting the Cambodian border. On the third day we would stop at some Viet Cong tunnels before having them drop us off in Saigon.

Sarah and I were each a little nervous. We didn't sleep much that night. On top of our nerves, we were kept awake by the stupid trucks across the street that played "It's a Small World" and "Happy Birthday" when the drivers put them in reverse. For two long nights and two long mornings, the last thing we would hear at night and the first thing we would hear in the morning was these horrible digital sounds blaring on the street.

Morning came, we listened to "It's a Small World" one last time, and we dragged our bags outside to meet Phuc and My. It took a while to get all our bags bundled and loaded. I still can't believe we fit four people and all our luggage (including Sarah and I with our 2 big backpacks, our 2 smaller backpacks, and our large duffel of clothes from Hoi An) on their two small bikes. Phuc motioned for Sarah to get on his bike, so I climbed on behind My.

Hey! They even had helmets for us! I decided to interpret this as a good sign.

Our drive started on smooth paved road that got rougher as we began climbing up the foothills. The vegetable gardens gave way to giant hillsides of coffee and tea. I made the mistake of showing some interest in the coffee trees (which I had never seen growing before) and for the next three days My, who didn't speak a lick of English but was desparately looking for a way to earn his keep as a guide, pointed out every frickin' coffee tree we passed. And we were in serious coffee growing land. Three, 10-hour days of passing coffee trees. At each one, My pointing to it yelling "Kah-FAY!" and I having to look interested and excited.

I'm being a little hard on My and I shouldn't be. We was a really nice guy who smiled a lot and was very curteous to Sarah and me. He was basically a good, safe driver, but he did have one fault: he believed that down-shifting admitted some kind of defeat and he was loathe to do it. The result was long, slow, terrifying climbs up winding hills, usually in the wrong lane, just keeping pace with the truck in the right lane he was trying to pass.

The first day's drive was spectacular. Once we reached the mountain pass the plantations ended and we entered thick jungle and bamboo forest. We looked west, down out of the mountains, and saw miles and miles of nothingness. Just jungle and rolling hills.

The road turned to mud and muck. For long stretches Sarah and I walked while Phuc and My hauled the bikes across muddy quagmires. After an hour or two we began to see some signs of habitation. First we saw coffee plantations. "Kah-FAY!" My said proudly. Then came a few lone homes, just shacks made of scrap wood. Then more and more fields, and, finally, a few villages.

We stopped at one of the villages and got off our bikes. Immediately a mob of kids swarmed us. They were dirty, barefoot, and wore scrappy soiled clothes. It was the first time in all of Asia that I had really been depressed by the poverty. In China the minority villagers still wore their traditional dress and carried it with dignity, but here the kids wore tattered Michael Jorden t-shirts that seemed horribly out of place. Perhaps I had romanticized what we saw in China, but this poverty in rural Vietnam seemed much worse.

The village leader led us to a small hut at the back of the village. Through Phuc, he told us that they were Catholics and since it was Sunday no one was working, it was a day of rest. He motioned for us to go inside, where we heard a loud chatter. The hut was dark. The floor packed dirt.

Once our eyes adjusted, we saw a crowd of men, mostly younger, crowded around a large clay vase. The vase was one of those things that museums label something like "Egyptian Drinking Vessel" and now I understood where the "drinking" part came in. The vase was filled with a toxic-smelling homemade alcohol, probably rice wine. A long bamboo straw had been placed in the vase, and the villagers were passing around a rubber tube that attached to the bamboo straw. Apparently, whoever translated their Bible confused "Day of Rest" with "Day of Alcohol," because these guys were liquored up. Big time.

Predictably, they wanted us to partake. You can't really say "No" in a situation like this, so I took the hose and began sucking. It took a lot of tugging because the straw was so long, but eventually I got a mouthfull of wine. It had bits of something in it. They seemed like sunflower seeds but were probably rice husks. I must admit, though, the wine wasn't that noxious.

Next they made Sarah drink. After that we refused more and motioned that we had to go. The ring-leader of the wine drinkers, a 45 year old guy was the drunkest of them all, thought it was really funny that Sarah was taller than him, and he made me take a few pictures of them back to back. Then we were off. . .

The next few hours took us through village after village. At each one, the kids would run to the side of the road, wave, smile, and shout "hello." I felt like Queen Elizabeth on parade, flying through the crowds giving them my polite little twist of the wrist.

At one village we saw something straight out of a Rousseau painting. There, just down a dirt path, tucked in behind palm fronds and bamboo, a group of native women were washing themselves. They had rigged a bamboo shower thing from a spring into a small pool that would make even the Professor from "Gilligan's Island" jealous. Unfortunately, we arrived at 70 year old Grandma washing hour, rather than at nubile 20 year old washing hour.

We rounded a bend and without warning saw laid at our feet several thousand feet below a broad flat plain of rice fields. We had reached the edge of the mountains. Phuc pulled over and waved for us to do the same. As we reached him he shouted "See ah-spoo."

"Huh?" I looked at Sarah. "What?"

"Let's see ah-spoo," he replied.

"See ah-spoo!"

It took a while, but we eventually realized he was saying "Sit a spell."

American slang always sounds funny coming from non-native speakers, and somewhere along the line Phuc had picked up a lot. He loved to use it. In addition to "Let's sit a spell," which we heard at almost every break, we got:

"This man is head honcho."

"Bad bad criminal society in this town."

"Oo, la, la!"

"Y'all come back now!"

We dropped down out of the mountains and drove another 10 or 15 miles through rice fields. Here we stopped for the night at Lak, a small M'Nong village. All the houses in the village were built on stilts. They were long, maybe 60 feet. The walls were woven strips of bamboo and the roofs thatched.

It was a neat place to spend the night. The village definitely had a steady stream of western tourists so it wasn't totally untouched, but despite this it maintained its traditions and was a working, farm village. Pigs, chickens, and roosters ran everywhere. A few dogs lay in the dust. Sarah and I and our guides slept on the floor of a hut. At night, lights from next door shone through the woven walls in tiny dots, lighting up my mosquito net with a constellation of stars. Beautiful.

Morning came much to early. The first rooster crowed at 3:45. Others followed. (Still better than "It's a Small World," though.) By 4:30 the dogs and pigs were making lots of noise, and when I finally gave up trying to sleep and walked outside at 5:30 it looked like the village had been awake for hours. Kids were already playing soccer on the dirt road.

We had along drive today, so it was OK that we rose early. 330 kilometers. I don't know what that is in miles, but I can tell you it's a long, long ways. We stopped every once in a while -- at a rubber tree plantation, a cashew farm, a rice-paper factory, and a brick factory. Phuc was very knowledgable and we enjoyed learning how all the things were produced. Many of the workers at the brick factory were just 12 or 13 years old. They were smiling and laughing, but it was sad to see them working so hard so young, robbed of their childhood.

Riding the roads has been a bit scary. There is a steady stream of bicycles, ox carts, motorcycles, and pedistrians. There are no cars, but we see lots of large trucks. Our road has a dashed line down the middle, but apparently the truck drivers think it's supposed to be something you site right down the middle of your hood ornament. We can feel the heat of their exhaust as they drive by, inches away. The biggest danger, though, is from the dogs that dart across the street, or just lay there in the middle of the road, unconcerned.

We drove within about 5 KM of the Cambodian border (by the way, I'm quoting distances in kilometers not to be worldly and sophisticated but because that's what Phuc used) and stopped at the Ho Chi Minh trail. While we were taking pictures, Phuc suddenly became agitated and shooed us back onto the bikes. Later, he said that some army soldiers had driven by and that in the past they had levied "fines" on people taking pictures near the sensitive border areas.

Today, Day 2, was long. Long but beautiful. We followed a ridgeline that has extended for hundreds of miles. To our right were rolling hills that reached Cambodia and beyond. To our left, foothills and mountains of Vietnam. On both sides, coffee, coffee, coffee. "kah-FAY!" My said proudly.