The 11th and final [except for perhaps a late Xmas episode] episode of the second season of “The Grand Tour” on Amazon Prime was a special, in this case, the boys go to Mozambique in southeastern Africa.
The premise of the episode is to get a Nobel Prize for delivering fish from Mozambique’s capitol of Maputo – where fish is plentiful – to Bingo, a small village in Mozambique’s interior where, presumably, the locals would be eager to receive bounty from the sea.
To perform this task, James May has employed a 1984 Mercedes T which is reputed to be reliable, Jeremy Clarkson takes the safe route with a Nissan Hardbody and Richard Hammond goes on a different tangent with an Indian-manufactured TVS Star motorcycle.
May has decided the best way to transport fish from Maputo to Bingo is by converting the back of his Mercedes into a mobile fish tank while Jeremy elects to steal the ice machine from their hotel and use water along the way to keep refreshing the ice and keep his fish fresh and Hammond is going to attempt to use a rack attached to his motorcycle to dry his fish along the route. The initial fishing expedition netted only eight fish, so the boys buy some fish, octopi and other shellfish from the local fish market vendors to enhance their catch.
Almost immediately, James’ Mercedes keeps stalling after repeatedly being overcome with water as they drive through modest muddy puddles, forcing Jeremy to use his truck to tow him out each time [after waiting 90 seconds, naturally]. Finally, after many tow-outs, Jeremy is fed up and he and Richard abandon James only to have Richard encounter slippery road conditions that cause him to continually fall off his motorcycle. This proves amusing to Jeremy for awhile until he finally bores of watching Hammond fall off his motorcycle and abandons him as well.
They eventually all reunite but Hammond keeps falling off his motorcycle and, inevitably, James’ Mercedes stalls in a gigantic mud puddle, so Jeremy and Hammond take drastic action to solve the problem.
They arrive in Bingo after three days on the road to less-than-frenzied fanfare and fail to sell any of their fish to the mostly disinterested locals.
Overall, the episode is not quite on par with their previous road special efforts when they were on “Top Gear” – but it was above average with one of the highlights being James and Jeremy discussing fresh and saltwater differences. ASN awards the Mozmbique Special an 89 out of 100.