It’s been a couple of weeks since I poked my head in this door, but to be fair, I’ve hardly been growing mold on the sofa. Last weekend I was, once again, exploring the pitted highways and byways of southern Vietnam by Vespa scooter, this time up into the modest mountain landscapes of the Central Highlands surrounding the old French hill-town of Dalat, and then down through an endless succession of hairpins and spiraling turns into rice field-packed plains and the oceanside retreat known as Nha Trang.

I flew into Dalat Saturday evening to join up with another of our Vietnam Vespa tour groups, this time a crew of seven who were doing the full Vespa Adventure — seven days worth of scootering from HCMC to Nha Trang. By the time I met up with them around dinnertime, they’d already been riding for three and a half days, having traded the the pang of sea salt and drying fish for the fragrance of fir needles and wood smoke the day before, with the drive up into the highlands from the coast and Mui Ne’s famous white sand dunes. We spent the evening on the outskirts of Dalat, inside one of the traditional wooden longhouses common to the Lat ethnic minority. One of 50-plus such minorities within Vietnam, the Lat can hardly be called Vietnamese; they speak a different language entirely (their Vietnamese language skills are almost nonexistent) and their dress and culture calls to mind Indonesia or French Polynesia more than Vietnam. The evening began with a judicious application of home-distilled rice whiskey, served with two long straws in a pottery jug, which — it became clear afterward — is meant to help visitors loosen up for the singing and dancing that was to come.

The views on the road down to Nha Trang the next day, as always, were spectacular — even along the 20km stretch of mountainside road that’s being resurfaced between Dalat and Nha Trang. The result was a ride that seemed to shake our teeth loose and rearrange our innards permanently. The orange dust of the unsurfaced road covered everything for meters on either side: trees, houses, motorbikes, barnyard animals, sleeping dogs and people. Massive orange clouds billowed up at the touch of a wheel, obscuring the roadway and anything on it in a fog of ochre-colored powder. Visible in glimpses beyong the orange-tinted world of the road was the river, sidling along through hills and forest below and to the left, its lure a song that could not be heard, only imagined. When we finally reached the end of the dirt path, we asked for directions to the nearest swimming hole from a local and plunged as a group into the rishing water beneath a decrepit bridge, some in shorts, some in their undergarments, others wearing considerably less.

An evening in a traditional longhouse with Lat ethnic minority villagers -- from whom Dalat takes its name -- seems more Indonesian than Vietnamese

The group gets an early start the next morning for the downhill run to Nha Trang

The scenery opens up right away

For local shepherds, the mountain roads serve as handy cattle trails

Brunch must be observed, even if it's just for a cool glass of iced tea and a chance to sponge off two hours worth of road grit

Not all of the road down to Nha Trang is paved in the strictest sense of the word

Always leave time for a spontaneous dip in the river (swim trunks optional)

You've got to get out of the city to see views like this.

How does one measure horsepower in a cow?

Nha Trang at last

The beachfront at the Sailing Club, just a few meters walk from Louisiane Restaurant and Brewery

Ancient Cham empire ruins lie just across the bay at Nha Trang

When I first came through Vietnam in June 2008, just after being politely bounced from Japan, I knew I had a friend here, sort of. Two friends, actually – brothers named Steve and Ken Mueller. The Mueller boys had gone to Bishop England High School just a couple of years ahead of me, though I hadn’t really known them then, as it was an unwritten but strictly enforced law at my high school that one could not speak to or acknowledge anyone in any grade below than you, upon pain of the worst kinds of adolescent punishment. (Paradoxically, having a friend in the grades above you was the ultimate coup, made fiendishly difficult by the former rule and often rendered pointless once achieved, due to the fact that your new friend had become, by dint of his willingness to speak to you, a leprous pariah of no use to you or anyone else.)

Steve and Ken had both attended Clemson University slightly ahead of me as well, but I hadn’t really known them there, either, as we’d effectively exchanged one set of rules for another, the new ones being even more rigid and unforgiving – that of the university Greek system. Younger and older were now okay, but fraternizing, as it were, with people not in the frat resulted in a kind of living death – imprisoned in a friendless purgatory, scorned by the ‘brotherhood,’ shunned by the non-Greek population for being in a loathed fraternity.

In any event, I’d managed to keep up with the Muller brothers by proxy in the years after university, and so I knew they’d both left the U.S. shortly after graduating and had been living in Vietnam for some time. It seemed like a good idea to look them up as I was traveling through Vietnam, as I knew nobody else this side of the Korean peninsula, and after attending my friend Andrew’s wedding in Bali two months hence, I would once again be jobless, homeless and without a plan. It felt like a good time to look up dear old friends.

Almost two years later, I’m in business with Steve Mueller. Turns out he’d been living in Ho Chi Minh City for ten years, had a Vietnamese wife and a son, owned several successful businesses including a popular cafe in Pham Ngu Lao ward, and was just about as happy as a pig in shit. One of these businesses, though now winding down, was keeping up with orders for restored vintage Vespa scooters, which he sold and shipped all over the world. (See more on that story here.) The gig was slowing down when I arrived because, in the ten years since he’d begun, other folks had got wind of the international demand for restored vintage Vespas, and restorable bikes had become much harder to find in Vietnam, though labor was still inexpensive.

The result was that when I met up with him on my swing through Saigon in June 2008, Steve was trying to repurpose his Vespa business into a high-end tour company offering guided trips through southern Vietnam’s coastal nether reaches on vintage Vespa scooters. All he needed was a partner to handle sales and marketing. The rest, you can figure out yourself.

Last week, Vietnam Vespa Adventures had our biggest week of business yet – a group of ten young Australians and an American contractor working in Iraq. The tour: three days on the coastal road from Ho Chi Minh City to Vung Tau (via hydrofoil ferry) and then onwards to the the tiny fishing village-slash-local resort town of Mui Ne. Including the Vespa Adventures team we took along (myself, Steve and his wife, Phuong, tour chief Josh Baker and friend Kurt , plus a road crew of three, a driver for the support van, and various other miscellaneous groupies and hangers-on), we had a convoy of nearly 20 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the great fortune to ride a classic 1968 Vespa Sport along the Gulf of Thailand, eating authentic local cuisine, staying in three- and four-star resorts, driving through the countryside of a developing nation where life is almost as simple and pure as it was 100 or 1,000 years ago, but I highly recommend it. Fortunately, I now get paid to do so.

Next week, it’s our eight-day tour to Nha Trang. I won’t be able to make the whole thing (classes at RMIT resumed this week), but I’ll hook up with the team in the old French hill town of Dalat on March 6 and join them for the downhill run to the coast. Come to Vietnam some time and join us. I’ll make sure you get a dear-old-friend discount.

The Vespas outside the ferry terminal at Vung Tau, where we orient our guests on how not to die immediately on the roads in Vietnam

The 'adventure' part starts for many with learning to ride the scooters

First stop: Long Hai hills and memorial pagoda, followed by lunch à la campagne

With the Gulf of Thailand mere meters away, it's almost possible to forget about your aching bottom

Not all those we share the road with are lucky enough to be followed by a support van

Nothing amuses the local residents in the countryside more than white people riding 40-year-old motorbikes with expensive new cameras

Workplaces here are still catching up to bleeding-edge technology like the internal combustion engine

Sometimes there ends up being just as much traffic in the country as there is in the city

The fragrance of low tide and dead fish recognizes no national borders

Mom, if you're wondering how I took this photo, you don't want to know

In Italy, all roads lead to Rome. In Vietnam, they generally just peter out and die

Sure, it's hard, grueling, thankless work, but somebody's gotta do it

Ever since moving to Asia on an impulse two and a half years ago, I’ve been donning and alternately shedding personal identities like a character out of a bad espionage thriller. Except that my character has been more Austin Powers than Ethan Hunt. There was the indefinitely jobless layabout expat tourist in Japan, followed by the itinerant English tutor and, after that, unwitting illegal immigrant. I’ve spent three months as an unbathed, shaggy-haired (well, you know what I mean) bead-wearing backpacker hoofing it through a succession of smelly hostels and guesthouses Southeast Asia. Most recently, I’ve played the part of international university lecturer, where I’ve successfully conned Australian communications academics that I’m qualified to teach young Vietnamese students how to be professional communicators. But I have still another identity, a secret double life I’ve been living for almost a year and a half – that of international tour company owner and operator. It’s a far cry from newspaper editor, although the pay is about on a level and I’ll admit the view out the office window is an improvement.

More on my company Vietnam Vespa Adventures later. I’m just back from a three-day road trip up the coast to Mui Ne with 11 guests – a young, hard-drinking Aussie bunch – and my body is insisting on a long weekend of intensive care and recovery from the combined effects of overdrinking, overeating, sunburn, and acute rider’s butt before I resume classes on Monday. For the remainder of the weekend, I’ll don the identity of quietly moaning couch potato.

They love their mannekins in Vietnam. They’re a must-have accessory for every clothing outlet of any kind, no matter how small, how hidden, or how execrable the pirated Chinese-made reproductions they’re pushing. And for reasons known perhaps only to the world’s mannekin-makers, every single one of them presents a prototypical Western physique to the world. There are no Asian features of any kind to be seen in the mannekins of Vietnam. For me this begs the question: are there no Asian mannekins anywhere in Asia? In all my travels in this fair land, I’ve yet to see one. They’re all white, caucasian, often blue-eyed, tall and seemingly caught in mid-speech, articulating something in what’s clearly a non-tonal language: “Real? Real?? What do you mean by ‘real’?”

It’s rather difficult to believe, but it’s been almost exactly one year since I left Japan and became an itinerant in Asia. That number, you may recall, has special significance for me.

It was 11 and a half months ago that the congenitally polite officials of Japan’s Immigration Office took offense at the length of my undocumented stay in their country (“incorrectly documented” is really more accurate) and invited me to take a one-year holiday somewhere – anywhere in the world, really, as long as it was outside the bit of squiggly lines on the map within which lies the word “Japan.” It was an invitation there was no declining. And so on June 5 of last year, I left my first Asian home with slightly less luggage than I’d arrived with, no plan to speak of, even less of an employment strategy, a well-worn-in pair of relatively new hiking boots, and a global recession to welcome me.

It’s been an interesting year. If you’d suggested at that time that in June 2009 I’d be living in Saigon and teaching communications theory at an Australian university to rich Vietnamese kids, I may not have laughed directly at you, but I’d have probably wondered why you were drunk at 8:15 in the morning.

My second semester as a slightly surprised university lecturer ends Friday. My third begins in roughly two and a half weeks. In-between lies the date on which my temporary banishment from the wealthiest, most industrialized, most stylishly eccentric and necessarily vain nation in all Asia ends. My persona non grata status will lose two Latinate suffixes. I will instantly transform from a prodigal son to a where-have-you-been-all-this-time one. The thuggish brutes at the entrance will lift the red velvet rope for me, intone to one another, “He’s on the list,” and usher me into the bright lights and blinking neon fantasy world of modern Japan.

If all goes as planned, I’ll arrive in Osaka International Airport via Malaysia Airlines on Saturday morning at 7:15am – exactly 365 days after leaving. To say I’m looking forward to returning is an understatement on the order of “Sex with that girl from Slumdog Millionaire might not be too bad.” Osaka’s not the prettiest city on earth, but compared to Saigon it’s Shangri La, Xanadu, Neverland and Utopia all rolled into one mouth-watering makizushi. And Kyoto is in point of fact the prettiest city on earth, or at least one of them. Plus, unlike Vietnam, Japan has the benefit of being home to a civilization that’s actually advanced beyond the Iron Age. That’s not necessarily a crack on the Vietnamese people (after all, men pee on the side of the road in both places). But it’ll be nice to spend a little time in a place where the tap water won’t poison you.