South of Hoi An the Open Tour bus route separates into two branches, one continuing down the coast, the other heading inland. I took the latter, up into the central highlands to Dalat. During the French colonial days, Dalat was portrayed as something like an alpine resort, with pine forests, clear lakes, and a refreshingly cool climate. The villas of French administrators and officials can still be seen around the town, although today most of them are owned by the Vietnamese Communist party. In the Dalat Palace Hotel, vintage advertising posters from the 1920's and 30's offer the discerning traveller a piece of Europe in the heart of Indochina, with golf courses, cable cars, and fine food and wine.

A few years ago, some of the motorbike drivers in Dalat got together to form the "Easy Riders" - a team of guides who take tourists around the local area on the backs of their bikes. Soon they got a write-up in the Lonely Planet, and now, of course, every motorbike driver in Dalat calls himself an Easy Rider. They have a mysterious ability to track down newly-arrived tourists almost as soon as they get off the bus, and three or four of them found me while I was still wandering the streets looking for a hotel (maybe the backpack was a giveaway...) Their "chat-up lines" are all the same: "Hellowhereyoufrom? England? Lubblyjubblydavidbeckhammanchesterunitedfootballnumberone!" It turned out that the hotel I eventually settled on was a favourite hang-out for these guys, and I chose one of them, called An, to take me on a one-day tour. Before he decided to make his living from his bike An was a French teacher, and he also spoke excellent English. I jumped on the back of his beaten-up Honda Dream, and we set off.

Slightly out of town, we came to one of Dalat's most famous tourist attractions. The "Crazy House" is a guesthouse designed by the daughter of Truong Chinh, the Party General Secretary directly after the death of Ho Chi Minh. She studied architecture in Moscow, and the Crazy House is the result. Perhaps, given her father's position in the party, it was unwise to criticise the house while it was being built, or even to offer constructive suggestions; in any case, she seems to have had free reign (and probably unlimited resources) to indulge her architectural fantasies. From the outside, the place looks like a fairground ride - the Fun House, or maybe the Ghost Train. The walls are in the form of gnarled tree trunks or caverns; spiders webs of steel wire hang across paths; branches twist themselves into grotesque shapes. Each room in the guesthouse has a theme. In the "Bear" room is a jolly wooden bear sticking his hand in a honey pot; the "Termite" room has the dusty yellow colour of a termite mound; the "Tiger" room was cordoned off, since it was occupied by a honeymoon couple from Saigon ("Easy, tiger...") Despite the effort that must have gone into its construction (and bits of it are still being built), the whole thing looked very amateurish - like a secondary school arts project. I give it a C+.

Maybe the most interesting part of the house was a memorial room to Truong Chinh, with newspaper cuttings and official photographs documenting his achievements and services to the Party. It was a slightly selective look at his life, and missed out the fact that Truong Chinh was demoted from a high position in the Party due to this role in the failed land-reform programmes shortly after the end of the Vietnam war. He rose up through the ranks again when the Party leadership started to favour the Chinese model of communism over the Russian (Truong was a strong advocate of Mao Zedong), and saw that his pro-Russian enemies in the party were "purged". Most of them ended up in prison or re-education camps.

On to the Dalanta falls, which would have been a very nice set of waterfalls had they not been turned into a kind of "resort". The path leading down from the entrance is paved with fake tree-trunk stepping stones, and ugly wooden models of a tiger and eagle sit incongruously next to the falls themselves. Beside the path back up to the road, two depressed monkeys (live ones this time, not models) stare out at visitors from their tiny cages. I asked An about all of this. Why had someone decided to surround a natural attraction with tacky tourist kitsch. And what was the point of the caged monkeys? "Dalat is popular with honeymoon couples" he said. "When they come here from Saigon it's a big adventure for them, and they like to see wild animals." "Not really wild though, are they?" "Well most of the wild animals in the forests have been shot, so this is the best that we can do."

There is, however, still much unspoiled natural beauty around Dalat. We rode a long way out of town on roads that wound through the hills, and I understood why the French colonists had such a fondness for the place: the scenery was far more European than Asian. The smell of the pine forests brought back memories of long car journeys across Europe when I was a child - sitting in the back seat looking out of the window at lakes and mountains, as we drove through Germany and Switzerland on the way to visit my mother's family in northern Italy. From the back of An's bike, it was only the occasional sight of a conical hat that reminded me where I was. We rode on, stopping at a Chinese temple, a Buddhist meditation resort linked by cable-car to a restaurant on top of a nearby hill, and a small village whose main attraction was a giant concrete chicken. In a way, you could say that Dalat has something for everyone.

The sun was almost down, and as we rode back to the hotel through the centre of town, An spotted a couple of tourists, laden down with backpacks, who had obviously just got off the bus and might just be interested in taking a guided tour tomorrow. In a few minutes we were back at the hotel, An found his friends, and like a bee doing a waggle dance he gave them all the details of his sighting, and the direction in which the tourists were heading. Two of the Easy Riders shot out of the door and headed off in pursuit. So that's how they do it...