North to South Vietnam Dual Sport Motorcycle Tour

Thirteen nights and around 2,500 kilometres from Hanoi to Saigon on dual sport bikes, the full length of Vietnam. The hire is included, with limited damage insurance.

Pu Luong opens it among terraced rice fields, then Con Cuong where remnants of the Ho Chi Minh Trail begin to appear, and Phong Nha-Ke Bang, a UNESCO site holding the largest caves in Indochina, with a boat trip into them.

The Western Ho Chi Minh Trail carries the route to Khe Sanh through the old demilitarised zone, past the former American airbase that was besieged for seventy-seven days in 1968. Hue follows, the imperial capital, with the Citadel, a royal tomb and a boat on the Perfume River.

The Hai Van Pass comes next, the Pass of the Ocean Clouds, which Top Gear made famous and which climbs over a spur of the Annamites with sea on both sides, and Hoi An gets a rest day, a UNESCO listed trading town of lantern-lit lanes. Kon Tum follows in the western highlands among coffee farms, then Buon Me Thuot with Elephant Lake and a river ferry, Da Lat below the Langbiang range with its night market, and Nam Cat Tien with a family-run bungalow, before the rice fields and ferries into Saigon. Prices are quoted in US dollars. Dual sport bikes mean the trail sections are ridden properly rather than skirted, and the small-capacity Hondas are the right tool for Vietnamese traffic, which is busy, fast and governed by conventions that take a day or two to read. Two weeks is the minimum for a country shaped like this one, and the route uses almost all of it on back roads.