Motorworld (17 page)

You can buy a Big Mac in Reykjavik and listen to Australian disc jockeys talking about what’s coming up ‘this hour’.

But in India, I could find nothing that would remind Wilbur or Myrtle of home. India is a larger, hotter version of Britain
circa
1950.

They have inherited our love affair with bureaucracy, our legal system and, best of all, our figures of speech from a bygone age.

When driving past the railway station in Bombay – a building the Americans would call impressive, or cool – I asked my taxi driver what it was. ‘From British days,’ he said. ‘Most odd and solid.’

Later, another taxi driver described the mosque in the middle of the bay as ‘most sturdy and spiffing’. This was fantastic.

But it paled into insignificance alongside the message you find on the label of a bottle of Kingfisher beer. It says ‘most thrilling chilled’. Isn’t that just wonderful?

The Americanisation of the English language just hasn’t happened on the subcontinent so that when you pick up a newspaper there, it appears to have been written by Mr Grayson and Mr Cholmondley-Warner.

Just 10 per cent of the nation actually speaks English but it is English, not American, and anyway, 10 per cent of the Indian population equates to very nearly one hundred million people.

And seemingly each one of them queued up each night, in the bars and nightclubs and restaurants to tell us that every educated Indian has a love–hate relationship with the old Motherland. They hate us for having been there but are grateful that it was us, and not the Spaniards or the Germans.

I was told by one, ‘The British had a habit of raping a country, of taking what they wanted, but at least they never tried to reshape the people who lived there. They
left us alone to get on with life. We like that. And you did give us cricket.’

We gave them more than that. We also gave them the Morris Oxford, which they turned into the Hindustan Ambassador, and more recently, the Rover SD1. It was actually built there to avoid a massive import duty, but even though there were only two other types of car on the market it failed spectacularly.

Like cricket, it was complicated, boring and prone to stopping every time it looked like rain, but worse, it was expensive. To fill it up with petrol, for instance, you’d have needed 2,000 rupees, which is twice what the average Indian earned in a year.

Amazingly though, the Indians still haven’t given up with us. Indeed, when a British Airways 747 pulls up to the gate at Bombay airport, the entire ground crew come outside to welcome it.

The trouble is that in the 1930s, a quarter of all Rolls-Royces ended up in India and most were subsequently customised with jewelled headlamps, ivory-plated doors and tigerskin seats. They’re still out there too, reminding the people that Britain is a byword for luxury.

That’s why, when they were looking for a new car to build, they turned to Rover, who have just sold them all the tools to make the Montego. Today, there are twenty different types of car in India but the turbo diesel Austin will be by far the most expensive at £20,000 a go.

Expensive when you think that you must give way at junctions to vans and buses, but there you go.

On the last night of my stay in India I took a long stroll
down the beach in Bombay and watched the sun slipping into the sewage they call an ocean. I saw kids kicking ponies, women urinating on the sand and people whose begging life had stopped when leprosy took their arms.

I thought about the filth, the squalor, the cricket, the massive inequalities and the blundering bureaucracy. I thought about the carnage on the roads, the filth that is Calcutta and the endless head-wobbling.

I was momentarily distracted when a small gurgle from my nether regions announced that my normally iron constitution was under attack from an ice cube I’d enjoyed earlier, but it soon passed and I was able to resume my mental shenanigans. Why, when everything was wrong with this country, did I like it?

It’s taken a year to work it out but here’s my answer. I don’t know.

Mine’s been an easy life. At the age of eight my mother thought it would be a good idea to take me on a bus. This turned out to be a bad idea when, in a loud voice, I asked why it kept stopping. She pointed out that other people needed to get on and off but I was still confused. And the confusion turned to horror when I asked whether it would stop at the end of my grandfather’s drive, or whether it would go all the way to his front door.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t even go down Spring Lane. We have to get off at the Ivanhoe and walk.’ WALK? What was this new verb? What is the possible point of a bus if you have to do walking? But all was well because my grandfather was waiting at the bus stop in his Bentley.

At around this time, my mother designed Paddington Bear, which provided the funds for my education at Repton School in Derbyshire.

I was able to land a job in journalism on the
Rotherham Advertiser
because grandfather, a doctor, had delivered the editor’s baby during an air raid in the war.

And I found myself on
Top Gear
after sitting next to the producer at a party.

And my luck didn’t run out on
Motorworld
. It only rained when we specifically wanted it to. People turned up at the appointed hour and said exactly what we had
hoped. Machinery never broke down. The camera never jammed.

This, for two years and eleven countries, was the law.

But then we arrived in Dubai and absolutely everything that could go pear-shaped ended up looking like an artichoke.

The customs confiscated bits of vital equipment. Our Range Rover caught fire. And on the last night, the very last night of our two-year world tour, we found ourselves in the middle of a religious festival and that all the bars were forbidden from selling alcohol.

Let’s take it step by step. In order to demonstrate how Arabs are now more interested in power than purple-velour headrests, we borrowed an Escort Cosworth which had been tuned to develop 420 horsepower.

You may recall that our interview with the driver was conducted at the roadside. This was because it broke down.

Then the falconers didn’t turn up, and when they did, three days late, the hunting vehicles had disappeared. Then the heavens opened and in the next ten days Dubai received more than two years’ worth of rain.

There were floods so deep, smaller people needed an aqualung just to go shopping.

We were having to rejig our already vague schedule on an hour-by-hour basis, which would have been hard enough in a media-aware country like America. But in the United Arab Emirates to change a long-standing arrangement is to ensure it won’t happen. We know this because even if you don’t change anything, it won’t happen either.

Take the fun run for an example. This was an event where 750 cars and upwards of 2,000 ex-pats head into the desert in their off-road cars for two days of getting stuck and lost, and then stuck again.

The only way it was possible to demonstrate the enormity of such an event was from the air, which is why we’d hired a helicopter.

This had been organised for weeks. It had the backing of their government. The pilot had been briefed. But air traffic control decided fifteen minutes into the flight that it was a military area and that the chopper should return to base.

That meant we had to spend all day playing catch-up with the rest of the competitors – a problem that was made even harder because we had to lug half a ton of film equipment around.

Just 50 yards into the soft sand and a call for help came over the radio from Keith, the cameraman. His Discovery was stuck up to its axles in powder.

Happily, the producer, Andy, was in a 4.5-litre 24-valve, 6-cylinder Toyota Land Cruiser pickup which looked like shit but which, off-road, was unstoppable. It became known as the Millennium Falcon.

And it pulled the Discovery out. And 20 yards later, it did it again. And then, 250 yards on, it repeated the process once more.

Tactfully, we took Keith on one side and explained that, in order to keep going, he must stick the gearbox in first, in high range and never, ever, ever lift his right foot from the carpet.

Keith, we said, it doesn’t matter if the valves begin to bounce through the bonnet, or if you’re about to crest a brow which may be the precursor of a sheer drop. No matter what, Keith baby, you must drive everywhere absolutely flat out.

Now this was all right in my Jeep, and the director’s Range Rover and the Millennium Falcon because they were empty. But on the first bump taken at speed in the Discovery, £150,000-worth of camera equipment leapt out of the boot, ricocheted off the roof and ended up in the passenger footwell.

In the end, we were actually saved by the rain, which gave the sand a more gluey texture allowing poor old Keith to drive a little more slowly. The downside was simple. All hopes of catching the other cars up were dashed.

But I didn’t care because I have decided that driving in the desert is better than sex.

Certainly, it’s a damn sight rougher, as you are hurled sometimes three feet out of your seat. This means your right foot leaves the throttle and that, of course, is catastrophic, because the revs die, the wheels bog down and you are then faced with an hour’s digging.

But on the flatter, harder-packed plains, you can get up to 100 mph or more, safe in the knowledge that there is nothing to hit, that you aren’t breaking the law and that your exhaust fumes can’t even find a flower to throttle.

The desert is a big deal in the UAE.

The fun run happens annually, and is organised by the
Gulf News
newspaper for ex-pats who, very sensibly, would never dream of heading out there alone.

Over the last ten years I’ve been fortunate to see some truly epic scenery. There are the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, the Yorkshire Dales just near Keld and the wall reefs that surround the Maldives.

But for me, the best views are to be found in a desert, and the best desert of all has its eastern fringes 30 miles from Dubai. They call it the Empty Quarter.

There is no life out there, just millions of tons of sand which have been shaped and crafted by the wind. It’s a constantly changing landscape but it is never anything other than extraordinarily beautiful.

Fun too, because most nights teenagers take their tuned four-wheel-drive cars to the wastelands for a bit of dune-bashing.

Every night, hundreds of guys choose a particularly arduous slope and see who can get up it… and before the tree-huggers start to whinge, I should explain that after everyone goes home, one breath of wind is all it takes to erase their tracks.

Now I had a 4.6-litre Range Rover which had air suspension and the pressure in its tyres lowered to 10 psi. Here, then, was the world’s best off-roader which had been modified to do the job. And it failed.

The reason is simple – 4.6 litres is not enough. You need a lot more than that, and special sand tyres which are nearly slick. Some skill is useful too.

One guy had an ordinary-looking Nissan Patrol and he could dawdle up the slope, changing gear halfway up if he felt like it. He could stop at 45 degrees, and then get going again.

On the rear window there was a large question mark, which provided the perfect answer for anyone wanting to know what sort of engine it had. A big one. With some turbos, at a guess.

We were deeply impressed but there was more to come because these guys like to drive home on two wheels. One veered on to the wrong side of the dual carriageway and then swerved back so that his Nissan hoiked itself over… and stayed like that for fifteen miles!

Each to his own. In England, young chaps show off by seeing who can drink the most pints, and who will order the hottest curry. Out there, where they don’t drink, the challenge is to see who can drive the furthest at 45 degrees.

Others do doughnuts while some indulge in full-bore, smoking-tyred, wailing-banshee quarter-mile tests.

The police don’t really care, and nor do passing motorists, most of whom simply pull on to the hard shoulder for a gawp.

Let’s be honest. The average Arab isn’t really in a hurry to get anywhere. I mean, it’s not like the next meeting will be make or break. And they don’t need to get the cheque into the bank on time.

These guys are so rich, it makes your teeth itch. If Elton John lived out there, they’d put him on income support. We worry about winning the lottery when most of the Arabs are getting that sort of cash every day. Some, I suspect, make millions every hour.

It made the news in Britain when a Dubai sheikh wandered into a London furniture store and bought every single item in the showroom. The bill was £325,000
which is nothing. They lose £325,000 down the back of the sofa most nights.

I know of one woman who made a set of curtains for someone’s house. He paid the £340 bill… and gave her a Jaguar XJS convertible as a present.

When Mohammed Bin Sulayem said on the programme, ‘I am not a rich man,’ viewers all over Britain gasped because I’d already explained that he had a Ferrari F50, a tuned F40, a Jaguar XJ220 and a Porsche 959. In addition, he has a Bentley Continental R and a Toyota Previa.

Here are some more details. None of them is insured and every night, they sit in his drive with the keys in the ignition. Sure there isn’t much crime in the UAE but we’re talking here about maybe £2.2-million-worth of cars.

And yet he’s right. Comparatively speaking, in Dubai, he’s just an average, ordinary Joe.

The Rainbow Sheikh, on the other hand, is not at all average. Even by Sultan of Brunei standards, this guy is a serious player.

We were shown first of all to the garage at one of his homes in Abu Dhabi and I must confess that I was dumbfounded. To my left, I was dimly aware of a biplane and a helicopter and a couple of rather nice gin palaces, but they were bit-part actors in an RSC performance of
Twelfth Night
.

I walked around the white-painted… hangar is the only word, taking stock of the machinery. It was so diverse: over there a Mini, and here, a Dodge Viper. There was an amphi car, a Lamborghini LM002, a Citroën 2CV, a wild
array of pickup trucks and vans and, over on the left-hand wall, seven S-Class Mercs, each one painted a different colour of the rainbow.