Dalat Countryside Easy Rider Tour

The Easy Rider format is a Dalat institution and slightly odd if you have not met it before: you ride pillion, a guide does the riding and the talking, and the day is built around stops rather than kilometres. That makes this a good option for travellers who want to see the Central Highlands countryside without holding a motorcycle licence, and a poor one for anybody hoping to ride themselves. The route out of town starts at Tuyen Lam Lake, a reservoir in the pine forest south of Dalat where the tour typically stops for strawberry tea. From there it works through the small industries that support the area: a mushroom farm, a silk factory where the worms and the reeling process are both on display, a cricket farm, and a coffee farm producing the civet-processed beans marketed as weasel coffee. Between them come the Chicken Village, named for the concrete rooster at its centre and the local legend attached to it, the Elephant Waterfalls with Linh An Pagoda on the hillside above, and the flower-growing village at Van Thanh. Guides working this circuit have often been doing it for decades; the two named in the published account had eighteen years each on the job. One caution worth reading before booking. 'Easy Rider' in Dalat is not a single company. It began as an informal association of guides in the 1990s and has since fragmented into several competing outfits trading under near-identical names and websites, alongside independent guides who use the term generically. The listing here reflects a day tour on the standard countryside circuit and the meeting point given for it, the Sweet Lavender Hotel in central Dalat. Confirm directly with whoever you book through who will be guiding, what the day costs, whether lunch and site admissions are included, and whether the price is per person or per bike. The riding itself is easy: sealed roads, short distances and a pace set by the stops. Expect roughly eight and a half hours door to door, and expect that to stretch if the group lingers.

A full day on the back of a motorbike through the farms and villages around Dalat, ridden pillion with an Easy Rider guide at the controls rather than self-driven. The day starts at the Sweet Lavender Hotel at about 8.30am and runs until roughly five in the afternoon. The published itinerary strings together Tuyen Lam Lake, the Chicken Village and its nine-spurred rooster legend, a mushroom farm, the Elephant Waterfalls and Linh An Pagoda above them, a silk factory, a cricket farm, a weasel coffee farm and the flower village at Van Thanh. The guides stop at each one to explain what is going on, and the order can be shifted if you would rather spend the day on landscape than on workshops. Meals and entrance fees are paid as you go, not bundled into the tour price.