Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- It's been three decades since Ho Chi Minh's communist followers defeated the U.S. in Vietnam. Today, their path to victory still snakes through the mountains and rain forests near the border with Laos. Locals call it Duong Truong Son, the Truong Son Road. To the rest of the world, it will forever be the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

During the war, the North Vietnamese moved hundreds of tons of food and supplies daily down this network of roads and paths. I have much less: just myself and a 125-cubic-centimeter Honda motorcycle.

Tourist coaches are a fine way to travel in Vietnam if you're rushing from point A to point B. But buses don't stop for the likes of the Katu, hill-tribe villagers who adorn their homes with skulls of deer, foxes and wild boars and shaman-blessed stones. Or for people splitting bamboo for chopsticks. Or cultivating velvety cat's ear mushrooms. Or tending silkworms. Three trips to Vietnam have convinced me that the best way to see this country is on two wheels.

``Like a sedan chair,'' laughs my guide, Binh, as he straps my plastic-wrapped rucksack to his motorcycle with thin rubber cords.

`Easy Riders'

Binh, 50, and his sidekick Trung, 31, are members of the Easy Riders, a loose affiliation of about 70 motorbike guides based in the southern town of Da Lat. For the next two weeks, this pair will shepherd me and my wife, Laura, north along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, then east toward the coast and finally south to the beach resorts of Nha Trang.

Ho's battalions rolled into Saigon in 1975, and North and South Vietnam were united a year later. What the gaunt, goateed revolutionary would make of his country today is anyone's guess.

Despite decades of war, first with French colonialists and then with the U.S., little hostility remains toward foreigners. People usher you into their homes and offer fruit and green tea. In much of the country, foreigners are a novelty. Small children hide behind their mothers and gape at pale-skinned visitors.

In cafes, locals shuffled their chairs closer to eavesdrop on a conversation in English, which many have heard only in movies. We spend our first night in Jun, a village that's home to members of the M'Nong tribe, expert fishers who build their houses on stilts to store their livestock beneath.

Pig Fight

A pig fight that breaks out 4 feet (1.2 meters) below my mattress at about 3 a.m. is, thankfully, quickly over. We've brought a Polaroid camera, so in the morning we present the local chieftain, Buot, and his wife, Mai, with photographs of themselves. Instant photos prove popular everywhere we stop.

At breakfast, we watch a mahout guide his elephant along a lakeside path. Perhaps this sad-eyed pachyderm was an unwitting warrior in the war, used along with trucks, bicycles and water buffaloes to transport Russian-made munitions at night. Extensive bombing by U.S. B-52s never managed to stop the flow of supplies and troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Rolling along the trail as the morning mist steams off the treetops, I can easily visualize Viet Cong guerrillas melting into the sparse jungle. Some of the land is still resisting regrowth three decades after being denuded by defoliants such as Agent Orange.

Farther north, the knots of old-growth jungle get thicker and more frequent. It's hard to fret about your bonus or your mortgage while watching a wizened woman in thin sandals tiptoe across a swaying bamboo bridge 20 feet above a tea-colored river, a bundle of firewood strapped to her back.

Highways, Cows

With the World Bank predicting an economic growth rate for Vietnam of 7.5 percent for both 2005 and '06, infrastructure improvements are visible everywhere we go.

Muddy tracks that threatened to unseat us three years ago are now shiny black highways, though no one has explained the status upgrade to the stick-wielding boy herding 11 cows along the tarmac.

New electricity pylons bestride the rolling valleys, disfiguring the view but bringing power to remote communities. We stop at a village of 12 families of the K'ho ethnic minority that were connected to the electricity grid for the first time just three days earlier. ``Now they can get televisions, and their children can learn Vietnamese,'' Trung says.

Munitions Hunters

The rising tide isn't lifting all boats. Among the trees outside the town of Pleiku, a man wearing headphones sweeps a long metal pole from side to side, seeking remnants of the 15 million tons of ordnance that the U.S. dropped on Vietnam during the war. It's risky work.

At least 89 people died in 2004 after triggering bombs or mines, according to the 2005 Landmine Monitor Report. If the makeshift detector finds live munitions without blowing its owner to smithereens, he'll sell the explosives to a fisherman, the metal to a scrap dealer.

Riding into Kon Tum toward the end of our third day on the road, we hear the eerie sound of Radio Communism telling tales of tractor production or chocolate rations from speakers strung from the trees. The news, we're told, is always good.

Catholic nuns care here for 415 children at two orphanages, one of which we visited in 2002. The 136 glow-in-the-dark yo-yos and 50 skipping ropes we've brought don't quite meet demand. The kids are happy to share, though, and during two long days we exhaust ourselves sharing in the fun, encouraging the shorter enthusiasts onto low walls to stop their yo-yos from smashing into the ground. By the time we leave, the kids are experts at ``walking the dog.''

Raw Boar

Meals are a culinary adventure. Our standard operating procedure is for Binh to stride into the kitchen of our potential eatery, inspect the available produce, write a menu and then oversee the chef's efforts to follow his recipes.

He often does most of the cooking himself. Dunking raw morsels of wild boar into a bubbling pot of spicy red stew without losing your grip is a good test of chopstick dexterity. My personal favorite is beef in lemongrass; Laura is mad for caramel pork baked in a clay pot.

After a night in the tourist-thronged World Heritage site of Hoi An, we head south along the coast down Highway 1. In waterlogged rice fields, farmers supplement their incomes by fishing with electricity.

Electrocuting Fish

They strap car batteries to their backs, run current to the end of two long sticks and zap the small fish that flounder between the rice plants, flicking their stunned catch into bamboo baskets.

In a roadside shack, 3-inch (8-centimeter) black seahorses are pickled in rice wine along with starfish and lizards. The potions are sold to passing truck drivers convinced of their medicinal properties. It takes us four days to meander to Nha Trang, including one night in an immaculate beachside hotel run by the Vietnamese army.

Every morning and afternoon, grinning schoolchildren shout hello as they stream past, impossibly elegant in crisp uniforms, the older girls in Vietnam's silky national dress, the ao dai, no matter how foul the weather. You can only hope that the tiny schoolboy standing on the pedals of his too-big bicycle didn't crash to the ground after relinquishing his tenuous grip on the handlebars to wave at you.

Hiring a Guide

Hiring an Easy Rider costs $60 a day per person, which covers all of your food and accommodation. These guides carry numbered blue badges; if yours doesn't, make sure his English is up to snuff and that he's riding a proper motorbike, not a moped.

A flight to Da Lat from Ho Chi Minh City costs about $28. Don't expect four-star luxury. The mattresses are thin, the blankets scratchy and the fans and air conditioners unreliable.

But the sheets in the budget hotels are clean, the receptionists are friendly and there's hot water aplenty for showers, provided you remember to flick on the switch for the bathroom boiler as soon as you drop your backpack on the bed.

And don't let the traffic chaos of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi deter you. On most roads, you're more likely to be dodging stray goats than Toyotas. Beeping horns and klaxons are less intimidating once you realize that's how mopeds, cars and trucks communicate.

Helmets are now obligatory. The Easy Riders, as well as speaking fluent English, are safe drivers. Binh says he has covered 400,000 kilometers (248,500 miles) in eight years without a single accident, as evidenced by his dent-free motorbike. More Mild Bunch than Wild Bunch. Just don't challenge them to a karaoke competition along the way. You'll lose.

To contact the writer of this column: Mark Gilbert in London at magilbert@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 9, 2006 00:03 EST