Three men and a coffin, a refrigerator and a 100 kg pig in a bamboo cage

are but a few of the things spotted on the backs of motorcycles during a 4 day motorcycle tour we took through the central highlands of Vietnam on the backs of the rides of a couple of Nha Trang 'Easyriders.'

In country where there are 30 motorcycles for every car (Saigon alone has 5 million motorcycles), two wheels is the way everything gets moved. Other freight spotted on the backs of 'motos': a dozen live ducks hanging from their feet, 10 boxes of Budweiser beer totalling 240 bottles, a queen sized mattress folded in half, 60 litres of water (I know because I drew 30 litres out of a well for the driver), two dozen durian fruits, several hundred bananas, a 50 litre bottle of compressed natural gas (yikes!) and even worse, 50 litres of petrol, a couple of dozen coconuts in massive panniers, a 4-inch wide giant bandsaw blade slung across a rider's shoulder, various families of five with two kids wedged between the parents and the baby holding the handle bars, two sheets of plate glass 1.5 metres by half a metre held by a passenger, a freshly born calf in a wire cage, a half dozen five metre long pieces of rebar over a driver's shoulder, a cage crammed with piglets, 10 metres of air conditioner duct, bundles of giant bamboo, 200 pairs of trousers folded and stacked, a cubic metre of firewood and a glass-fronted wood credenza.

Ok, to be fair the motorcycle with the coffin and undertakers did have three wheels and the credenza driver was pedalling...