The Top Gear Challenge Part 5 (968.6 - 1413.1km)

The next leg of the journey should have involved two relatively relaxed days of about 260km each. Unfortunately, as was becoming too common, this was not how it worked out. We had a slow start thanks to needing to post home our suits and shoes. After this breakfast took much longer than we thought and then we decided to get out bikes cleaned and give them an oil change. By the time we left town we had managed to waste all of the morning (though our bikes were awesomely shiny).
 

This quickly became worse as after only 20 minutes on the road, just long enough to get away from civilisation, my bike packed up and showed no sign of wanting to start. This put me in a bit of a panic until some locals came over to give us a hand. The bike was soon wheeled over to what turned out to be a mechanics and after 10 minutes it was running perfectly. A small electronic control box had failed and luckily this was one spare part that we did have. As we still had to pay for labour we were charged another huge amount, this time 66p!

With such a bad start to the day we needed a miracle to get back on schedule and of course this is not what we got. Another half hour after the breakdown we realised that we were not on the right road. After being sent backwards and forwards by locals for an hour we decided to just stick with it as we knew we were at least going vaguely the right way (thank you compass keyring). This turned out to be a bad decision (though not the worst of the day). We ended up spending about an hour riding through 6 to 12 inch deep mud (bye bye shininess) at extremely slow speeds. What made this worse was the locals whizzing past us on little scooters. Eventually we found the road we should have been on; though it was on a bridge going over our heads.

We started making good progress for a few hours and then came the really bad decision. I thought we could make it 55km before dark in about an hours time… I was wrong. After about 20 minutes it started raining heavily making visibility bad and the roads treacherous. This meant we had to slow down and so we were caught out in the dark (what was it we were told about riding in the dark… oh yeah “suicidal”, I wonder if rain improves this?). In the middle of nowhere with no sources of light it was soon pitch black meaning we were even slower and so wetter. Eventually we hit Kam Duc at about half past 6, soaked through and miserable, luckily stumbling straight upon a guesthouse.

The next morning, now with lots of distance to make up, things didn’t get any better. We woke to the sound of rain hammering on the guesthouse roof and looking out of the window it didn’t seem like it was going to let up. We had to bite the bullet and set off in the rain. This meant the progress would again be slow though on the plus side at least the bikes were clean again!

Luckily the rain only lasted about 3 hours and then suddenly cleared up. We then nearly managed to make a worse mistake than the previous day. As the sun was starting to look low we were contemplating either trying to hit Quy Nhon (our next planned stop) or stopping short. In the end we decided to stop short and leave 90km for the next day. This was definitely the right decision as it turned out the rain in the morning had stopped my watch for an hour or so meaning we only had 45 mins of light left and not an hour an 45.