The joys of doing dangerous things

For the uninitiated, roads in Vietnam are nuts.

In the Western world, the onus is always on the individual driver not to do anything stupid on the road; in Vietnam, the onus seems to be on everyone else to get out of the way when they do.

So you get people on scooters stacked with live pigs riding the wrong way down a dual-carriageway highway; you get buses full of people overtaking on blind corners on high mountain passes.

And there I was, on the back of a motorbike, trusting my life to a tourism student called Khien who'd claimed to have been doing this for four years but was also horrified to realise he'd left his map back in Dalat.

We'd been making our way back to his home town from the coastal city of Nha Trang, taking a winding, wobbling path through the central highlands, braving the potholed roads and kamikaze drivers in search of some nice scenery and a different side of the country.

Before the rain hit, we'd nearly been collected by a guy on a scooter carrying about 20 ducks strung around his bike like some sort of poultry miniskirt, and had had to come to a skidding halt in front of a large herd of cows that, of course, was feeding in the middle of the highway.

It had all been terrifyingly, stupefyingly crazy.

And now it was raining.

But here's the stupidest part of all: I was having fun. Not just mild fun - wild, whooping and hollering fun. Here I was on the back of a motorbike, in the middle of who-knew-wheresville, Vietnam, about as far away from real life (and hospitals) as it's possible to get, in the rain, and I was having a ball. As that storm came pelting down, most probably half blinding poor Khien at the front as we bumped along on our merry, wet way, I had an epiphany: danger is fun.

Don't believe me? Ask anyone who's been bungy jumping. Ask Jessica Watson why she hopped in her little boat and circumnavigated the globe.

Putting yourself in danger is a thrill - surviving the experience, even more so.

And what better time to experience danger than when you're travelling? That's the time you want to do something different, something you might not get the chance to do at home - and, let's face it, despite what the tabloids might tell you about marauding inner-city gangs of dodgy plumbers and Labor politicians, Sydney's a pretty safe place.

So when you travel, you want to experience the gamut of what life has to offer and if that's having the hair stand up on the back of your neck as a lion roars somewhere close by your safari camp, or having to strap your valuables under your clothes in the very real fear that you might get robbed today, so be it. It's like putting chilli on your food. First time you do it, it's kind of painful and fairly pointless. After a while, though, you're piling on more and more and you don't want to have a meal without it.

That's why I'd wanted to do the motorbike trip in the first place. I probably could have taken a bus to Dalat, or even flown. Or not gone at all.

But the motorbike trip seemed more adventurous, an experience tweaked with the danger of the Vietnamese open road.

And it was everything I'd expected: a wild, thrilling three days of near misses and roaring terror, interspersed with the odd coffee break.

Was it dangerous? To Khien, no. It was everyday life. To me, most definitely. As it turned out, though, nothing bad actually happened. We made it to Dalat safe, sound and a bit soggy.

Given Khien had forgotten his map, the most danger we were in was of getting lost.

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