The Top Gear Challenge Part 2 (71.2 - 281.4km)

Thanks to us taking an extra day than we had planned to get the bikes, and the very short distance we covered on the first day we had nearly 750km to cover in the next 3 days if we were to reach Hue by new years eve. As our bikes were fairly slow this meant we had to have 3 full days of riding hopefully with no interruptions...

The first day looked like it was getting off to the worse possible start as after about an hour I was pulled over at a police roadblock; bare in mind we have no insurance, no valid driving licence and our ownership papers were in the name of some random Vietnamese man! The response couldn't have been better, as I slowed to see what they wanted the policeman saw that I was white through my visor and waved me on without saying a word.

Soon after the checkpoint we switched from the main route onto a smaller road to cut across towards the Ho Chi Minh Trail (everything is Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam). The road was mostly one lane wide, incredibly windy and started to pass through some really amazing landscape. At around lunch time we started to try and find food, a fairly tough task since we were now deep in the middle of nowhere. Eventually we saw something that looked sort of like a large outdoor restaurant. This turned out to be wrong, we had instead stumbled upon some sort of village celebration. 

They welcomed us in and sat us down like guests of honour bringing out a table full of food. Some of the food was OK but there was one bowl that was full of intestines, organs and a lot of unidentifiable bits that tasted as if it was cooked in bile. Of course this was the bowl nearest me that I was served several helpings of by the guy sitting with me. Being British I felt the need to finish it off so as not to offend! 

Worse than the food though was the insistence of our hosts that we toast them with their home brewed rice wine, despite the fact that we we riding our bikes! The response to our protests (via sign language as no one could speak English) was that 1. we were eating so it would cancel out the alcohol and 2. this is Vietnam and drink riding is OK! Before we left we were shown inside to a room where people were playing karaoke (they bloody love it in South East Asia) and were eventually persuaded to sing to a roomful of them. Thinking we had found the Proclaimers song I'm gonna be mislabelled as 500 miles we decided we could handle that. Unfortunately it was a completely different song called 500 miles that neither of us knew so we blundered our way through it much to the delight of the audience. 

When we were finally allowed to leave (after one more shot of rice wine for the road) we had fallen behind schedule. When we made it into a town to stop for the night it turned out that we had actually made good progress after lunch. This was partly due to some new found confidence (where could that have come from…) on the small windy roads and a couple of hours spent on the nicely surfaced Ho Chi Minh trail. Even so the extra long break meant we had still only managed just over 200km in the day. This left us over 530km to cover in the next 2 days before new year.