Vietnam: the aftermath

Thanks Top Gear team….. if it hadn’t been for your Vietnam special, I would have never travelled there and fallen in love with my girlfriend

Vietnam is perhaps my favorite Top Gear special. It certainly gave me a craving for snake vodka. Also, I’m Southeast Asian so I can relate to the landscape quite well.

vocalid is your gf Viet?

I have watched this special quite a few times and I still laugh through the entire thing. I know it has nothing to do with cars but for the comedic value it is brilliant!

Well this special is my favorite episode, behind the US Road Trip from 2007, it is some of the best of Top Gear, I really love the Specials and I hope they keep making more.

best on tv ever. end of

I was new to Top Gear when season 12 came out, and every episode was better than the last. My wife and I watch it together. She is not a car person, but likes the comedy. (and of course Richard Hammond). This is my favorite episode, though I love them all. We really learn a lot from it too. I bet we’re not alone in this. Very different from American car shows and tv in general. Thank goodness I still have a reason to have a tv. (and an internet). I think I could watch the trio read the phone book every episode and I would still watch. Thanks for the great show!

first time i came to vietnam was in 2005 and have come back 3 times now I have been living in vietnam for over 1 year now my wife (meet in vietnam) and we watched this episode with her parents and nobody could stop laughing even if though her parents speak very little english. love top gear and very happy to see this episode. Also coming from somebody that drives a scooter in saigon and elsewhere in vietnam they did remarkably good for not driving before! Thank you guys for a great show!!

Love Top Gear..The Vietnam Special is simply the best episode….watched it many times…It’s just that epic…Hope the new Christmas Special (India..)will be great…

DONT DELAY JOIN TODAY……… TOP GEAR THE MOVIE.!! ON FACEBOOK

very good in fact it was that good that i have not stoped wacthing it at all thank you

the best one so far in my opinion…watched it yet again this morning on dvd

I’d take the Russian tank-bike any day. Solid, good engine, looks comfy…

Though James really should’ve gone for a C90 instead of a 50, the extra 80%ish power would have made a serious difference. They even made them with trick two-speed rear sprockets for markets such as Vietnam, so if you were moving from flat-ish paved roads to mountains and dirt tracks you could take a few minutes, joggle the chain around, et voila… low ratio drive, perfect for slamming along unstoppably at upto 30-ish (or like 8mph in 1st gear) until the terrain and surface returned to something more amenable. Might’ve won it, then.

In fact I stand corrected…

http://en.wikipedia.org/w iki/Honda_CT_series

Trail CT110 for the power and kit, or Trail CT90 for the availability (honda’s most common offroad-oriented bike that isn’t an all out scrambler). Bet there would have been quite a few hanging around in Vietnam. Whether they would have been available in running order within the boys’ budget, though, is another matter.

Still wouldn’t have quite kept up with the Russian if Hamster had thrashed it everywhere, but would otherwise have stayed in contention with the other two whilst cruising.

Very strange. They had about 1000 us dollars and had bought that peace of sh.. why not normal scooter, for example Honda Dio. But it was fun though.

A friend just ran a recording of this for me last night. Taken in the time it was made- splendid, once-in-a-lifetime fun! Some years after the piece was done, VN has become yet another once-bargain playground for the big-fish-in-little-pond nguoi ngoai; it would’ve been fun to see this piece shown just among friends vs inviting anyone who wants to act like an idiot foreigner by its example (not that the cast are idiots- it’s the copycats who really make a mess of foreign relations! No wonder they’re starting to gouge us where they can…). But the idea of going someplace so unsophisticated and roughing it is great fun.
The comments about how you should’ve picked one of this or that bike evinces the breadth of thought of some of the crowd who are going now- and I might’ve liked the yellow Atlas SS to squirt round the hills on, too- as if there was one available. Don’t these viewers care to think that you bought these well-second-hand from what was on hand in the obvious desert of an until-recently 3rd world locale? Brill.
Yet, fun as it was, those into bikes might know that the pioneering thing’s been done on them- I just found a snap of an Ariel fitted to pontoons setting a record from Dover-Calais-Dover at 6:40, and some kid and his dad took Bantams through Africa years back, eating drive chains from the dirt- without an ML 320 full of them in chase.
And, while it was a true comment, the American adventure also took 58,163 (it’s up from that now that Agent Orange is recognized as what’s still killing vets) of that country’s lives (and, really, bags more Viets’) in an epic exercise in futillity to get from bottom to top.
But, on its own, without the waves of yousobig invaders of today and the disastrous gap in fiscal health between the poor, hard-working locals and those working for foreign outfits, your piece should have been the last word in stomping around that place as irreverent foreigner clowns. You’d be legends there by default, and VN would still have more of what made it fun for the few pioneers instead of the new crass commercialism (that Nha Trang is getting so Latvian Hollywood theme park!). You guys had- and made- the best of it.